A new building going up on the west side of the Capital City is designed expressly to provide short-term rehabilitative help.

As Dover and Kent County grow, there’s an increasing need for medical services and particularly for therapy assistance for patients discharged from the hospital.

A new building going up on the west side of the Capital City is designed expressly to provide short-term rehabilitative help.

Work on The Center at Eden Hill began in December and is expected to be complete by the end of this year, said Sean Mace, president and managing member of the new center.

“Dover and all central Delaware is severely underserved when it comes to subacute care rehabilitation,” noted Sean Mace. “We wanted to bring a state of the art facility here for that particular service.”

Subacute care is available to patients needing comprehensive, inpatient care which is less intense than that given in a hospital. The Center at Eden Hill will feature 80 private rooms, each with its own bathroom, in a three-story building of about 65,000 square feet. It should provide between 120 and 140 new jobs, including nurses, therapists, food service and administrative staff members.

The cost is about $18.7 million, Mace said. It is being built to the east of Eden Hill Medical Center, established in 2008.

Although there are inpatient care centers in Dover, the number of beds available wasn’t keeping up with the demand, Mace said. Patients living in Dover and vicinity needing physical, occupational, speech or other therapeutic services after a medical procedure have been sent elsewhere, inconveniencing them and their families.

“A lot of times what happened was that there were patients ready to be discharged from the hospital, but not ready to be discharged to home,” Mace said. “It was not in their best interests.”

What was most beneficial, he added, was for patients to go to a subacute care center for two to three weeks before going home. Mace said costs involved in keeping a patient in the hospital can be quadruple those charged by a subacute care facility.

“They didn’t need to be in the hospital, running up health care costs,” Mace said. “The challenge was to find a facility that could treat them and one that was close to home. What we’re trying to do is provide a subacute care setting that gives hospitals the advantage of having beds available to discharge to.”

“We’re very conscious of health care costs,” Mace added. “We’re really trying to reduce readmissions to the hospital. If you can reduce readmissions, that’s an advantage to the patient and to the hospital system.”

Hotel-like atmosphere

The Center at Eden Hill had a rocky beginning. The backers, a consortium of physicians and private investors, first had to gain approval for a Certificate of Need from the Delaware Health Resources Board, which began a review in January 2013. The board approved the application nine months later.

An established care center, Genesis Healthcare, almost immediately asked the board to re-evaluate its decision, arguing there were enough inpatient care facilities available. The board denied the request in October 2013, prompting an appeal that eventually reached the state Supreme Court. The justices sided with Eden Hill in December 2015.

The design for the Center at Eden Hill was settled after the group’s consultants visited subacute care facilities across the country.

The model used was put forward by the Veritas Management Group of Colorado, whose standards include buildings reminiscent of high-end hotels, with large rooms, fine dining and a staff about twice that at other facilities. Veritas Management will run the day-to-day operations.

The hotel atmosphere is intentional, Mace said: “We want people to be comfortable.”

The center was designed so that individual insurance plans will have no issues covering a patient’s stay, Mace said.

“Insurance companies like these models because they’d be paying several times more to have someone stay in a hospital setting,” he said.

Staff members will be able to work with their patients for twice or almost three times as long as traditional care facilities, helping them to a faster recovery.

Each private suite will have adjustable beds and flat-screen TV and there will be a dining room under the supervision of an executive level chef. Patients may even have their pets visit.

In all, the medical center owns about 25.5 acres of the former Eden Hill farm. The property stretches from the current Eden Hill medical building eastward to the railroad tracks and from North Street south to the former farm’s tree line.

There’s enough room for three or four more buildings, although there are no plans at the moment for additional construction, Mace said. A building under construction between Eden Hill and the Kraft Heinz plant is not part of the complex.