Lexington Medical Center Northeast celebrates official opening

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Lexington Medical Center’s new 225,000-square-foot facility in Northeast Columbia is, as Lexington County Health Services District board chair Dr. Tripp Jones noted at its Tuesday ribbon cutting, larger than the health system’s original 1971 hospital.

Despite is sprawling size, the focus of the facility’s official opening centered on community.

“We look forward to taking care of the residents of Northeast Columbia for years to come,” Dr. Thomas Gibbons Jr., medical director at Lexington Medical Center Northeast, said during remarks before a ceremonial ribbon cutting that also included Jones and Tod Augsburger, Lexington Medical Center president and CEO.

The five-story facility is initially offering urgent care, imaging services, and physical and occupational therapy. LMC specialists Lexington Podiatry and Southeastern Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine opened satellite offices on March 15, while Lexington Urology is slated to open an office April 1 and Lexington Medical Heart and Vascular Center is among the specialists expected to open offices this summer.  

Future plans include outpatient surgery services and a fixed-unit MRI at the center, which will be open seven days a week from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m. and features a first-floor cafe and meeting space.

“We believe in placing access to urgent care or outpatient facilities closer to homes throughout Lexington County, historically, but now the Midlands,” Augsburger said. “We have done this well in Lexington, in Irmo, and if you look at the Midlands, Northeast is obviously a high-growth area out here. If you look around for outpatient access to care, you don’t see any, frankly.

“We built a place out here that hopefully the community adopts and is able to use for their day-to-day care, with specialists and urgent care, for a long time.”

Groundbreaking on the center, located at 3016 Longtown Commons Drive near the intersection of Clemson and Longtown Roads, took place in June 2019. Columbia-based contractor M.B. Kahn Construction Co. brought “the right team and a lot of hard work and working together as a team to put together a successful project,” project director Regie Bedenbaugh said. “There’s a lot of specialized equipment in the building and things you have to coordinate.”

Jones said the Northeast center has created 80 jobs with “more to come,” while Augsburger stressed that it continues a mission of providing top-notch area health care for LMC, which opened the first of four other community medical centers — on Lexington’s Main Street and in Irmo, Chapin and Saluda Pointe — in the 1990s.

“We’re one of the few remaining independent, locally governed hospital systems in South Carolina. There’s very few of us left. We think it’ s a defining difference,” Augsburger said. “All of our board members are residents of Lexington County. Our sole focus is in this community. We’re not building hospitals in Charleston. We’re not building hospitals in Greenville. We’re here to take care of our friends and neighbors in this community, and we think that provides us greater insight perhaps into the needs of our community, and we’re able to respond perhaps more quickly than some of those larger systems that have diverse markets and much larger footprints to manage.”

Community health care needs have been front and center during the past year of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, and LMC has been at the forefront of the fight at its main campus at 2720 Sunset Blvd. in West Columbia, where around 600 vaccines a day are being administered.

“It’s been terribly difficult as you can certainly imagine, not only for our patients in our community, but also for our staff who don’t get to Zoom their meetings, who don’t get to stay home,” Augsburger said. “They have to get up every morning and kiss their loved ones goodbye and put themselves at risk to come help their friends and neighbors. I’m honored that we have such a dedicated staff. That’s who Lexington Medical Center is.

“But it’s also been disheartening at times to see the debate or the discourse on a public health disaster. The more we can convince people to help pitch in by wearing their masks, by social distancing, by getting vaccinated, please, that helps not only their friends and neighbors, but it helps our nurses and our staff, who are, every day, trying to do their best to keep folks alive.”