Rehab hospital planned in Post Falls

A New Mexico-based health care company is planning to open a local rehabilitation hospital in Post Falls.

Darby Brockette, president and CEO of Ernest Health Inc. of Albuquerque, said the health service provider is planning a single-story, 40-bed hospital for long-term care. About 150 people would work in the 48,000-square-foot building, earning an average wage of between $38,000 to $42,000 a year, the Coeur d’Alene Press reported.

“The demographics are right, its a beautiful and booming community and a lot of new residents are moving in who are over 65,” Brockette said.

Brockette would not exactly say where his company was buying property.

Ernest hospitals admit patients recovering from strokes, heart attacks, head and spinal injuries and hip and knee surgeries who need to spend time in rehab before going home. The planned hospital will not have any emergency rooms or surgery facilities, officials said, and will contract with larger area hospitals for those services.

“We will not provide any services that will directly compete with existing (hospital) providers,” Brockette said.

Brockette said it is too early to say when construction may start in Post Falls.

“All the floor plans are the same,” Brockette said. “We just change the skin to ensure it fits into the community.”

Kootenai Medical Center CEO Joe Morris said he’s had several discussions with Ernest representatives, including one in the past two weeks. He said there’s a possibility KMC could work with Ernest in the future.

“We’ve discussed selling services to their patients and down the road there’s a potential that we’d do more than that,” Morris said. “We don’t see them being in competition with us.”

The region is ripe for a rehabilitation hospital, Morris said.

“They’d serve a special niche as a long-term care hospital,” he said. “They could draw from North Idaho and even the Spokane area since there’s no long-term care hospitals in the area.”

Spokane-based St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute provides rehabilitation services but not long-term acute care, said Gary Smith, St. Luke’s chief operating officer. St. Luke’s, a nonprofit, could compete with the for-profit Ernest hospital on rehabilitation services, he said.

Ernest has three hospitals under construction. The first is slated to open soon in Las Cruces, N.M. Others are being built in Brownsville, Texas, and near Fort Collins, Colo.

Ernest plans to build 36 40-bed hospitals throughout the West in the next five years, said Lawrence Waldman, a University of New Mexico economist.

Ernest targets small, rural markets in the West that have a high senior population.

Many of those rural communities are underserved, and people have to travel to larger cities in order to get long-term, post-acute care, Brockette said.

Ernest Health started about a year ago when it received $40 million in private equity funding.

“We’re certainly not cash-poor,” Brockette said. “We’re blessed in that respect.”