EVERETT — The public will get its first chance on Saturday to tour a new $30 million medical building and satellite emergency room opening later this month in south Everett.
The building, called Swedish/Mill Creek, will be home to the first emergency room of its kind in Snohomish County.
Part of Seattle’s Swedish Health Services, the emergency room will be open 24 hours a day. But it is not on the same site as a hospital, as traditional emergency rooms are.
Patients will be treated for a maximum of 23 hours, then either sent home or transferred to area hospitals.
The emergency room will have 18 exam rooms. It will include advanced diagnostic imaging, such as X-ray, ultrasound, a CT scan and MRI, on-site laboratory services, as well as primary care and specialty care services.
When Swedish opened a similar facility in Redmond the week before Christmas, 2,500 people showed up for tours, said Melissa Tizon, communication director for Swedish Health Services.
Saturday’s open house at Swedish/Mill Creek is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The building is located at 13020 Meridian Ave. SE, near the 128th Street exit of I-5.
Swedish will lease 55,000-square-feet of space in the three-story, 86,770-square-foot building for clinical programs.
This is the third satellite emergency room opened by Swedish. The first was opened in Issaquah in March 2005 and now treats about 23,000 patients a year.
Swedish/Mill Creek will open in stages, with the emergency room scheduled to be ready for its first patients at 12:01 a.m. Feb 17. It will join medical imaging and primary care clinics as the first services to open in the building, said Ed Boyle, a Swedish spokesman.
The Swedish/Mill Creek emergency room is trying to fill a market niche, people who need quick treatment for some injury, such a broken bone, who don’t want the long waits traditionally associated with hospital emergency rooms.
It was built on a portion of the property that formerly was home to Puget Park Drive-In, Snohomish County’s last drive-in theater. The new emergency room will be roughly halfway between the two closest hospitals, 9.6 miles from Providence Regional Medical Center Everett to the north and 8.9 miles from Swedish/Edmonds, the former Stevens Hospital, to the south.
The other two hospitals in Snohomish County are Valley General Hospital in Monroe and Cascade Valley Hospital in Arlington.
Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486; salyer@heraldnet.com.
Open house
Saturday’s open house at Swedish/Mill Creek is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The building is at 13020 Meridian Ave. SE, Everett.
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