The exterior rendering of Marion Health's Gas City location shows what the 4-story 100,000-square-foot facility will look like when completed. File photo
Marion Health Network’s medical campus off of I-69 and State Road 22 is still under construction as they approach the initial target opening date.
Originally, the goal was to have the campus open and operational by the end of 2022. With a month left in the year and a still unfinished building, the opening will likely have to take place later than planned. Gas City Mayor Bill Rock said he would estimate a completion date in the spring of 2023.
“It just depends on the weather. But I think they’re out there working every day. It seems like it’s coming along pretty well,” he said.
The facility is a four-story, 100,000-square-foot building that sits on approximately 100 acres of land off the interstate. Marion Health plans to offer a variety of services for patients, including new acute-care and ambulatory services to provide orthopedic/spine services for surgery, rehabilitation and outpatient clinic, family practice medicine outpatient clinic, multi-specialty outpatient clinic, emergency services with helipad, radiology, laboratory, inpatient acute care and flexibility for future expansion.
Marion Health selected Gas City for the project to make care more accessible to Grant County patients. At the start of construction about a year ago, then-Administrative Director of Marketing & Community Outreach Kate Lyons said the new campus would be located more closely to about 30 percent of the emergency room patients who have had come into the downtown Marion campus. Cutting down on necessary travel time for patients makes access to quality healthcare more readily available.
“The location was chosen specifically to serve that corner of the county,” Lyons said in a November 2021 interview. “There’s a huge need we’ve seen in that corner for ER services. It really is a one-stop shop for patients in that area. It will give them access to the care they need that they are driving downtown for now.”
The $80 million investment will provide around 100 jobs in the community. Rock said he is excited to see how the investment stimulates growth in Gas City.
“It’s going to create more jobs, assessed valuation is going to go up, we pick up another water/sewer user, there’ll be things that develop around it,” Rock said. “We’ve just been pushing the interstate really hard since we came in and it seems to be working. I feel like the interstate and being in between two colleges, Taylor and Indiana Wesleyan, that we have a hand up on a lot of different communities that aren’t that close to the interstate. And so we’re really focusing on what the interstate can bring into our city. we’re just excited for the growth that’s going to happen that’s coming down the road.”
Marion Health was not immediately available for comment on the ongoing project.
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