Growth on the horizon

Patients in Hampton Roads will have another option for health care in spring 2025 with the opening of the 98,000-square-foot Bon Secours Harbour View Medical Center in Suffolk.

Construction is moving along on the $80 million facility, which will include 18 inpatient rooms and four operating rooms in the expansion of its existing health care campus, which already offers emergency care, imaging and lab services. Bon Secours currently operates three hospitals in Hampton Roads and seven more across Virginia.

Bon Secours isn’t the only health care system expanding in the region. Sentara Health received an $833,800 grant from the Virginia Opioid Abatement Authority in June to start a mobile care vehicle “dedicated to treatment and services for individuals with opioid use disorder,” according to a news release. The VOAA, which was established in 2021 by the Virginia General Assembly, provides publicly funded grants to combat the ongoing opioids crisis in the commonwealth. The mobile care vehicle will hit the road in early 2025 and will serve the cities of Chesapeake, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk and Virginia Beach.

In major higher education and health care news, Old Dominion University and Eastern Virginia Medical School merged in July, creating Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences at ODU, an umbrella for all health sciences programming, including the medical school. Sentara Health is involved too, and it expects to double the number of residency positions over the next six to seven years.

In addition to increasing its residency program at Norfolk General Hospital, Sentara plans to create programs at Sentara CarePlex Hospital in Hampton and Sentara Williamsburg Regional Medical Center. Sentara committed $350 million over the next decade. It currently sponsors 240 residency positions in Norfolk and will expand that number to more than 400.

Also, ODU and EVMS are collaborating with Norfolk State University to form the Joint School of Public Health, which will award master’s and doctoral degrees in public health and health research. Li-Wu Chen, a former health sciences professor at the University of Missouri, was hired in March as its first dean.

Meanwhile, Sentara’s health insurance arm remains the focus of a three-year-plus federal civil investigation into whether it inflated premium rates for Affordable Care Act customers in Charlottesville in 2018 and 2019. Sentara has denied the allegations, saying it’s being unfairly targeted and had stepped into the market to prevent vulnerable Virginians from losing health care coverage.

Elsewhere in the region, Chesapeake Regional Healthcare announced a $3.7 million state grant to build the first psychiatric emergency program in Chesapeake. The program, which will occupy space in the hospital’s emergency department, will focus on patients suffering from behavioral health crises and is set to open in December. Chesapeake Regional also debuted its open-heart surgery program in April after a five-year quest for approval.

Riverside Health System announced an upgrade to its Leksell Gamma Knife at the Riverside Radiosurgery Center in Newport News, when it implemented Elekta Esprit technology in July. The upgrade will benefit patients undergoing treatment for brain metastases from other cancers, according to a release.

Riverside also announced leadership for the Riverside Smithfield Hospital that is set to open in early 2026; Dr. Justin Billings, a physician at Riverside Regional Medical Center in Newport News, will serve as the Smithfield hospital’s chief medical officer, and Michelle Wooten will become the hospital’s first chief nursing officer.  

This story has been corrected since publication.