Here are 23 gastroenterology and endoscopy-driven ambulatory surgery centers and facilities that opened or were announced this year.
1. Abington (Pa.) Memorial Hospital opened its Center for Advanced Gastrointestinal Surgery.
2. Advanced GI, led by board-certified gastroenterologist Gilbert Simoni, MD, opened a new office location in Thousand Oaks, Calif. The new office includes a larger operating room and recovery room than its previous location.
3. Baltimore Washington Medical Center opened a new digestive health center. The center will offer medical, surgical and diagnostic services for patients with gastrointestinal problems. The center will include a 14-member team, which is already part of the hospital's cancer center network.
4. Cape Regional Physicians Associates Gastroenterology opened its new practice location at the Cape Regional Medical Commons in Cape May Court House, N.J.
5. Colorectal surgeon Marc Levitt, MD, will lead the establishment of a Center for Colorectal and Pelvic Reconstruction at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
6. GRHealth opened its Digestive Health Center in a new location in Augusta, Ga. The new location is 43,000 square feet and includes a nine-room endoscopy suite, a weight loss surgery center, motility clinic, physician offices and an inflammatory bowel disease/colorectal cancer surgery center.
7. The Greater Gaston Center, a joint venture between a group of physicians and Physicians Endoscopy, could open in Gastonia, N.C., in December of this year.
8. Developers broke ground on the 90,000-square-foot Douglas Park Medical Office Park in Long Beach, Calif. One of the new medical office buildings will be occupied by physicians of Long Beach Gastroenterology. The physicians will operate the Greater Long Beach Endoscopy Center, affiliated with Surgical Care Affiliates.
9. Brookhaven Gastroenterology Associates, in collaboration with Frontier Healthcare, is opened the Great South Bay Endoscopy Center in Suffolk County, N.Y.
10. La Peer Health Systems, a Beverly Hills, Calif.-based outpatient surgery center, opened its Hernia Surgery Los Angeles. Board-certified colorectal and general surgeon Stephen Yoo, MD, will lead the center's team of physicians.
11. Konya Keeling-Johnson, MD, opened the Houston Southwest Colon and Rectal Clinic.
12. Huntsville (Ala.) Endoscopy Center filed a certificate of need application for the addition of two operating rooms.
13. Island Digestive Health Center, a joint venture between five gastroenterologists and Physicians Endoscopy, opened in West Islip, N.Y.
14. Logan (W.Va.) Regional Medical Center opened its newly renovated endoscopy unit. The unit includes a seven-bed pre- and postoperative area, three procedure rooms and a bronchoscopy room.
15. Frontier Healthcare Holdings partnered with the physicians of Long Island Digestive Disease Consultants to open the Long Island Digestive Endoscopy Center in Suffolk County, N.Y.
16. Northfield (Minn.) Hospital & Clinics plans to build a $6.3 million endoscopy center. The endoscopy center is expected to reach completion in August 2015.
17. Researchers have opened OpenBiome in Cambridge, Mass. OpenBiome is the country's first stool bank for fecal microbiota transplantation samples for C. difficile treatment.
18. Park Nicollet Health Services plans to spend $48 million on a new, 115,000-square-foot outpatient center next to its existing clinic in Maple Grove, Minn. The existing clinic will be converted into a surgery and endoscopy center.
19. Roswell Park Cancer Institute opened a new endoscopy center in Buffalo, N.Y.
20. Spectrum Health Ludington (Mich.) Hospital opened a two-suite endoscopy center in its surgery department.
21. Gastroenterologist Abha Havaldar, MD, and general surgeon Kenneth Shewell, MD, have opened a new private practice facility in St. Joseph, Mo. The practice, St. Joseph Specialty Clinic, has an agreement with Heartland Health/Mosaic Life Care, based in St. Joseph, to use its operating rooms.
22. Western New York Pediatric Gastroenterology opened a new office location in Batavia, N.Y.
23. University of Pennsylvania Medicine opened the Wilmott-Barna Center for Endoscopic Innovation, Research and Training in its Abramson Cancer Center. The center was established through a gift from the married couple Timothy Wilmott and Nancy Barna.