La Clinica’s first built-from-the-ground-up health care facility since the 1990s is less than two weeks from its grand opening.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, joined community leaders and board members Tuesday for a tour of the low-cost health provider’s 7,038-square-foot Acute Care Clinic at 638 Market St. in Medford.

When it opens June 10, the walk-in clinic will bring greatly expanded urgent care and acute care resources, plus built-in flexibility for everything from power outages to infectious diseases.

Wyden thanked La Clinica leaders, including CEO Brenda Johnson and board members, for their work in community health and bringing the new facility to life. The project involved raising $5.8 million in grants and donations — including $2 million in federal funding that Wyden and fellow Oregon Democrat U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley helped secure — and was supported by U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz, R-Ontario, during voting in the U.S. House.

“As far as I’m concerned, community health centers, dollar for dollar, just do as good a job as anybody who’s in the public health field and in community service,” Wyden said. 

“It’s going to help so many people,” he later added in front of the building.

The new facility features 12 exam rooms — including two cordoned-off rooms for patients that use separate heating and air conditioning systems. The facility contains a check-in “decision point” where staff behind a glass window can determine whether a patient should enter into a waiting room door on the left or a quarantine entrance on the right.

There are solar panels all over the roof, plus backup generators designed to allow the clinic to work at full capacity during an outage.

Johnson told Wyden that the facility was designed with lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Almeda Fire, and she described the facility as a community resource that can be used “perhaps in times of a flux or surge or need in the community.”

“I think those surges are the future of emergency medicine,” Wyden said.

The Acute Care Clinic also features La Clinica’s first X-ray services, which spokeswoman Julie Wurth said is expected to be online by August. Once operational, X-rays will be available at discounted rates to low-income patients.

“We’re close,” Wurth said. “That’s a big step for us.”

Chief Medical Officer Chris Alftine said one of the core drivers for this facility is to help divert patients from the region’s “very overcrowded and very expensive emergency rooms” and into the walk-in clinic.

“Much of the care that’s done in emergency rooms can be done at acute care centers like ours,” Alftine said. “Our patients have unique access challenges, and we feel we’re in a great position to meet those challenges in a way that other emergency rooms and acute care centers don’t quite understand.”

The new facility is roughly two and a half times the size of the original La Clinica acute care center next door. It opened during the COVID-19 pandemic as a drop-in clinic focused on respiratory triage, and was converted from a building the organization was using for storage that had prior incarnations as a service garage and an office space.

Alftine said the old building will be transformed into a new two-story annex that will include an expanded laboratory and a retail pharmacy with a drive-thru. The second phase is expected to open summer 2025.

The new clinic’s hours will be 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays. For more information, see laclinicahealth.org.

Community needs

During Wyden’s visit, local leaders pressed the senator on everything from healthcare education to housing affordability.

Wyden touched on efforts and ideas to make more healthcare training available to high school students.

“We’re spending a lot of money on job training, and not enough is going to health care,” Wyden said. “I’m trying to change that.”

Phoenix-Talent School District Superintendent Brent Barry told Wyden during the tour about early plans for creating a regional health care career technical education program.

“Our kids want to do it,” Barry said. “I think if we do a regional approach that would be very powerful.”

Mark Wisnovsky with Valley View Winery touched on rising housing costs during a roundtable inside the new facility.

“When I look at it as a whole piece, healthcare is a huge part of somebody’s budget … the largest part is housing,” Wisnovsky said.

He said that when he was starting out, the recommendation was for housing to make up 25% of a budget. Now that his kids are buying their first homes it’s taking closer to 50% to 70%.

“That just eats up such a huge amount of funds to pay for healthcare, to pay for insurance, pay for education, all those kinds of things,” Wisnovsky said.

Lilia Caballero, the Democratic nominee in the November Oregon House District 6 race, also touched on the need for affordable housing.

“I’m thinking of ownership,” Caballero said. “We want to break the cycle of poverty.”

Wyden said that housing is a priority that he seeks to work into every piece of legislation. For instance, he said that he’s obtained an agreement with the Republican chair of the House Ways and Means Committee to incorporate low-income housing credits in an upcoming tax bill.

A major challenge is getting Republicans to the bargaining table, Wyden said. Many in GOP leadership want to wait until 2025.

“They don’t want to operate on your time and what the community needs,” Wyden said. “They want to operate on political time.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated from an earlier version to reflect that the new Acute Care Clinic is not La Clinica’s first facility built from the ground up. The Phoenix Health Center was built in the early 1990s.