St. Francis Hospital-Mooresville
to open medical center in Plainfield

By Mary Ann Wyand

St. Francis Hospital-Mooresville is expanding its health care services in central Indiana with the construction of a medical and professional center in Plainfield.

The new facility, currently being built on Dan Jones Road just north of U.S. 40, will open in April 2006.

Keith Jewell, executive director of St. Francis Hospital-Mooresville, said the Morgan County hospital operated by the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration already serves many patients from Hendricks County.

“We see many patients from the Plainfield area,” he said. “It is one of the fastest growing areas in the state. Our new location will provide area residents with convenient, quality care close to home.”

The one-story, 22,000-square-foot medical facility located about 20 minutes from the hospital will house radiology, laboratory and physical therapy services.

It also will include offices for physicians specializing in family practice, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, colon and rectal surgery, and orthopedics.

Jewell said the new facility could be expanded at a later time to accommodate additional medical and surgical offices.

“We are looking at that facility to initially begin with two primary care physicians and one obstetrics and gynecology specialist, who will all be new full-time physicians and members of our medical staff,” he said. “We also will have a time-share medical office for physicians who may want to practice in Plainfield, but not on a full-time basis. They will have medical staff privileges as well.

“If things grow and go as well as we would like,” Jewell said, “our goal is that we would eventually have five or six primary care physicians at that location plus the ob/gyn and some surgical specialists, all of whom would be new members of the St. Francis medical staff.”

He said the new medical and professional center will bring 40 to 50 new jobs to Hendricks County.

St. Francis Hospital also operates two medical offices in southern Hendricks County in the Heartland Crossing area.

“When we were looking at providing medical services in Hendricks County—and we don’t make those investment decisions lightly—we found that the community had grown at a much faster rate than the medical resources of the community,” Jewell said. “It really looked to us to be a wise investment, one that was economically prudent, but that would also well serve a community that needs those services. It just seemed like a natural fit and a natural place to be able to extend our region to provide service.”

In addition to providing convenient access to medical care for Plainfield and Avon area residents, the new medical center will generate more inpatient and outpatient admissions to the 60-bed hospital in nearby Mooresville.

Currently, more than 50 percent of the hospital’s admissions are for a variety of outpatient services.

“We have continued to be blessed with the opportunity to serve a growing number of patients,” Jewell said, “and the most recent expansion that we did at this campus certainly gives us the capacity to be able to do that. I would suspect that if that growth continues at its current pace that it won’t be long before we’re thinking about growing again here at Mooresville.” †