Taking over the entire third floor of one building in the Woodlands Technology Campus, Pacific Medical Center plans to open its newest clinic in Bothell’s Canyon Park April 5.
Encompassing some 30,000 square feet, the new clinic at 1909 214th St. S.E., will have seven primary care physicians on staff, along with approximately 20 rotating specialists.
By the end of the year, Director of Clinic Operations Linda Eremic plans to have the new operation seeing some 180 patients a day. By 2015, projections calls for visits from 480 patients daily with an additional 50 employees brought on board.
For now, Eremic said besides physicians, the new clinic will have 75 to 80 employees, with what was about 30 positions still open as of early this month.
Those positions covered a wide spectrum of opportunities, from nursing slots to front-desk clerks.
Eremic will have no problem filling the jobs. For the 30 or so openings, she said she received between 400 to 500 applications. Eremic said she obviously can pick and choose carefully, a clear plus from an administrative standpoint.
“It’s also kind of heartbreaking, too,” Eremic added, stating a belief the large number of applicants is a clear reflection of a still-struggling economy.
Along with clinic Medical Director Brett Daniel, Eremic said Pac Med chose a Bothell location for a number of reasons. One had to do with a perceived service gap between the organization’s downtown Seattle clinics and satellite locations in such spots as Lynnwood and Totem Lake.
Still, Daniel also talked about being in the middle of Bothell’s bio-technology corridor and a hope of exploiting the resources that corridor might present. From Eremic’s point of view, she believes the technology zone has helped provide her with a quality pool of job candidates.
“It’s a great area to recruit in,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed it.”
While hiring for the new clinic has been one important step in getting it up and running, both Daniel and Eremic talked a lot about putting a focus on the patients who will be visiting. Eremic said patients want to avoid trips to Pac Med’s downtown clinics if possible, want access to their doctors and want to get in and out of that doctor’s office as soon as possible. With all that in mind, Eremic contends the Bothell clinic will be Pac Med’s most high tech in terms of patient service. She especially touted an electronic tracking system.
With every staff member and patient wearing a small plastic badge, sensors in the ceiling can monitor the location of everyone in the clinic. The system also helps track patient care, the whole idea being to make clinic visits smoother and quicker.
For example, if a doctor orders an X-ray, that fact will be noted in the system. Technicians will know instantly an X-ray is needed, the location of the patient and how long that patient has been waiting. The doctor can know the minute the X-ray is taken.
Eremic added the clinic will make extensive use of electronic medical records.
One other area has presented a special challenge to clinic planners: stocking offices and exam rooms, as well as bringing in sometimes large and presumably expensive medical equipment. Simply too big to be handled any other way, some diagnostic equipment — an ultrasound machine, for example — had to be hoisted to the clinic’s third-floor location by crane and brought into the clinic through windows. For Daniel, another challenge was laying out space for all the doctors and specialists, many of whom have very specific room and equipment requirements.
Despite all the administrative tasks, Daniel insisted he has and will continue to see patients.
“That’s why I went into doctoring… The patients are really the heart of it.”
