Submitted photo The Elkins Corridor H Medical Center, a 38,000-square-feet, $37 million facility, is scheduled to open to patients on Sept. 9, an official announced Tuesday.

ELKINS — A much-anticipated new medical facility will be open to patients sooner than expected.

Officials are targeting an opening date in September for the Elkins Corridor H Medical Center, being built at the former Teter Motors property on North Randolph Avenue/U.S. Route 219.

“We’re planning on a Sept. 9 grand opening, and I just want to update the community on where we stand and what’s going to be happening inside the building,” United Hospital Center CEO and President Dr. David F. Hess told The Inter-Mountain Tuesday.

“We’ll do a ribbon cutting and community tours at some point, we don’t have a date set yet on that,” Hess said. “Basically the contractor’s going to turn the keys over to us sometime in June. Then, probably in July or August, we’ll have some type of open house event, to make sure the community can come in and see what we’ve done.”

Hess said his goal has long been to open the clinic before the Mountain State Forest Festival in October.

“We are projected to be open to see patients on Sept. 9. My goal was, we wanted to be open before the Forest Festival. I thought it was incredibly important, when you get 75 to 100,000 people coming into Elkins, that they see the building completed, they know what’s happening inside of it,” he noted. “And practically speaking, if they ever needed anything, that it could be open for anyone who had an urgent need, because we will have an urgent care center that will be open seven days a week in there.”

WVU Medicine United Hospital Center broke ground for its planned “state-of-the-art” facility last June.

“It’s an exciting project. It’s 38,000 square feet, over $37 million that we’ve invested in Elkins and Randolph County,” Hess said. “UHC and WVU Medicine wanted to make sure that we had a big presence in Elkins, and not just a minor presence.

“We have a lot of patients who come to us from that area. This is us putting something in the community that was being asked for by that community. We had a lot of patients driving up to Bridgeport and Morgantown and saying, ‘Boy, I wish you had this specialist in Elkins so I wouldn’t have to drive so far.’ This is us meeting the needs of the community in their own backyard.

“Our anchor is going to be a seven-day-a-week urgent care. We’ll have cardiology with Dr. John McKnight, and thoracic and vascular surgery, and we’ll have orthopedic surgery,” he said. “We’ll offer the opportunity for cancer patients to get infusions, and their cancer treatment in their community.

“Patients can also come in and get their lab work done, X-rays done, even if they’re not seeing a physician in that building. We’ll have CT scan on site, we’ll have MRI on site, echocardiogram, ultrasound … we go back to the concept of ‘a hospital without beds.'”

Hess said that he believes the clinic will employ more people than officials at first envisioned.

“Initially, we had said 30, but there’s so much excitement, and so many people who want to be in this building, it will probably balloon to have over 50 people employed there on a full-time basis,” he said. “These will be hopefully Randolph County natives who work for WVU Medicine in their own community. Our intent is to hire local folks to be able to work in this building.

“We’ve got some local providers who have decided to come and join us and be in this building. Dr. (Donald) Fleming, an oncologist, will give us some time, and Ali Boyce, a nurse practitioner, is going to be joining us on the cancer side. The patients will be familiar with both of them, and I think they’ll be excited to continue their care with them in this building.

“We’ll also have some local emergency room doctors, who used to work in the Elkins area, and are excited to be coming back. Dr. Susan Bobes, she’s been working at the St. Joseph’s ER, and she told me, ‘Hey, I can’t wait to go back to work in Elkins.’ She’s a well-known and well-respected physician in the community,” Hess said.

“An OB-GYN doctor, Dr. Kim Farry, told me she wants to offer the best product to the community there in Elkins. We have welcomed primary care physician Dr. Alyson Leo, an Elkins native. We’re incredibly excited that physicians who are Elkins natives want to be part of this facility.”

Hess praised the construction crews who have pushed the project forward.

“We’re ahead of schedule on the construction, and things are going very well,” he said. “What we have seen is a very welcoming community. Our contractors have been working feverishly to make sure that we have this open for the community.

“We had a long fall last year, and we were able to get under roof, and that was really the lynchpin of it all. They were able to get inside and get a lot of interior work done. Now, they’ll come back and start doing some paving. When the weather gets nicer, you’ll be able to see the exterior start to develop a bit.

“I give a lot of credit to March-Westin as the general contractor on this job, overseeing the project,” Hess said. “We’ve also had Thrasher Engineering help with the project as well. They did a lot of the site work, and we had a lot of up-front work done by Thrasher.”

Hess said there is currently no plan to offer food service at the site.

“We have not settled on anything like that just yet,” he noted. “If we get the feedback from enough people, we can certainly look at having something in the lobby. The lobby is pretty expansive, it’s pretty large. If there’s a need for some kind of snack bar there, we’re willing to look at that.”

The property that will house the clinic includes 6.91 acres and was purchased in July 2023 by WVU Medicine United Hospital Center for $1.65 million.

United Hospital Center joined with West Virginia University Hospitals in 1997 to form the West Virginia United Health Systems. UHC employs more than 2,500 individuals and is a member of WVU Medicine.