Dec. 15, 2022

A new three-story medical center is designed to enhance Avera Health’s services on the growing east side, including a new emergency department.

The $34 million project is on the southeast edge of Dawley Farm Village at 26th Street and Veterans Parkway, and most services are scheduled to open Jan. 4.

That includes the new emergency department and an urgent care center.

“We’ve been pre-hiring emergency physicians and nurses in the past year and keeping them trained, so we’ll be up and running day one with our emergency department and be good to go,” said Dave Flicek, president and CEO of Avera McKennan Hospital & University Health Center.

“This does take pressure off our main campus ER, so I didn’t have to remodel or expand that as its volume has increased.”

Avera also has a west-side emergency department at a medical center at 28th Street and Marion Road, which is similar to the new east-side center.

The new 86,000-square-foot building also offers laboratory and imaging services, including CT, X-ray and ultrasound.

Other services include family medicine, urgent care, obstetrics/gynecology, pediatrics, internal medicine and dermatology.

The plan is that all services will be operational by mid-January.

“Urgent care has been busy, definitely, with cold and flu and RSV all in the community, so the timing is good to be able to move urgent care to this bigger building and out of the strip mall,” said Ryan Vanden Bosch, assistant vice president of primary care at Avera Medical Group.

“We’ve been maxed on providers at Dawley since 2014, so we’ve been needing to add physicians. I think we’re going to see huge growth just like we did at Marion Road.”

Avera’s strip mall location at Dawley is on a lease. It could be renewed and used for different services, but no decision has been made, Flicek said.

The larger location has been planned for several years and was delayed when the pandemic began.

There’s also room for growth, with two-thirds of the third floor not built out yet.

The building will start with 17 providers, with room to about double that according to demand.

“Our main strategy is access in the neighborhoods,” Flicek said. “For parking and convenience, it just makes a lot of sense for the consumer.”

Physicians appreciate the model too, Vanden Bosch said.

“To be in a building with 24/7 services means they have access to more in-house lab testing than they would and a CT machine. Some of the labs that would have been sent to McKennan across town and come back hours later are coming while the patient is still there for the visit,” he said. “And to be able to run down and talk to someone in another specialty, they really enjoy from a practice standpoint too.”

Demand in Sioux Falls for health care is high, Flicek added.

“The specialty hospital (at 69th and Louise) will be completely filled. We’re doing the fifth floor with beds. At 28th and Marion, you can’t fit another physician, so we really did need 26th and Highway 11 to grow our providers,” he said. “We’re looking forward to having it full.”

The new Dawley Farm Village location will host an open house from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday.