Freestanding ER to debut across from former St. Vincent’s site

North Shore-LIJ’s freestanding emergency center is slated to open next week across from the former St. Vincent’s Hospital.

Housed inside the 160,000-square-foot O’Toole Building On Seventh Avenue between 12th and 13th streets, the facility will be the first on Manhattan’s lower West Side since St. Vincent’s closed in 2010, as the New York Observer reported. Dubbed the “HealthPlex,” the site is designed to handle up to 45,000 patients per year and will operate as an extension of Lenox Hill Hospital, which is also a North Shore-LIJ affiliate, on the Upper East Side.

In addition to urgent care, the emergency room is to offer additional medical services such as ambulatory surgery, outpatient rehabilitation, imaging, health and wellness services as early as 2015, according to the Observer.

The HealthPlex is reportedly something of a test case in the city as to whether urgent care centers, specialty clinics and free-standing ERs can fill the void left by a number of recent hospital closures, many of which followed struggles to remain financial solvent in the face to empty beds and an outsized number of patients visiting the ER who did not need emergency care, according to the Observer.

The scenario was a contributing cause to the closure of St. Vincent’s, which Rudin Management subsequently converted into luxury condominiums, and Long Island College Hospital’s in 2013. The State University of New York, which currently owns LICH, reached an agreement in principle regarding the 20-building medical campus last month that would yield outpatient services and a 20-bed emergency facility. [NYO] — Julie Strickland