Essentia Health Expanding Baxter Clinic

Essentia Health is expanding again! This time, it’s adding on to the current Baxter Clinic Building. For Essentia, this is a big deal.

“For Essentia Health, this is a big deal,” Adam Rees, President of Essentia Health (Central Minnesota), said. “This really means we’re going to have quite a bit more square footage to hire more primary care, more specialists to better serve the community.”

The expansion will add 20,000 square feet to the 48,000 square foot building, and add an additional 32 exam rooms to the Baxter Clinic, which offers a variety of medical services.

“Primarily primary care,” Rees said when asked about the services the Baxter clinic provides. “We have urgent care services as well. We have women’s health. We have obstetricians. We have our advanced care practitioners which tend to be nurse practitioners. We have full lab services. We have full radiology. We have physical therapy as well. So we just want to continue to grow those services to better meet the community’s needs. We know sometimes it can be hard to find a primary care doctor, but we just believe everyone should have access to great care.”

The Baxter clinic is one of many other clinics for Essentia Health, which has seen an expansive growth to other outlying communities.

“We’re also committed to the outlying areas,” Rees said. “So, we have an expansion going on in Pierz, we opened up the Emily clinic a few years ago, we’re planning on more growth in some of the other clinics as well.”

As for Baxter itself, Essentia Health has been an economic catalyst for the city and surrounding community.

“Once Essentia landed on this property, the development around it really kicked in,” Baxter Mayor Darrel Olson said. “They were kind of the catalyst for what happened here and a lot has happened since then.”

The estimated time of completion for the expansion is set for Spring 2018.