PARKERSBURG — Expanding medical services to the area so people can stay closer to home continues to be the focus of WVU Medicine Camden Clark Medical Center, officials said.

Over the last year, the hospital worked to bring new services to the region, expand existing ones and upgrade technology while increasing the number of medical professionals to provide those services. The hospital has 2,200 to 2,300 employees.

“When you look at 2024, it was a busy year for us,” said Camden Clark President and CEO Sean Smith. “(It) was a year of growth and transition.”

He replaced retiring President/CEO Steve Altmiller in August.

“As we continue to move forward, we are focusing on access of care,” Smith said. “Looking at a hospital of our size and a community of our size, what kinds of services do we have that we need to provide depth of services and enhance access to care for?

“What services do we not have, but should? Our mission is to meet the health care needs of our community for a lifetime.”

The medical center continues to recruit doctors with specialties in vascular surgery, open-heart surgery, critical care, neurosurgery and more, Smith said.

“There really should not be a reason that patients and their families would have to leave the community for these types of services,” he said.

There are times when they will have to send people to Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown for very specialized care, but the goal is to try to keep patients locally.

“We are providing 24/7 critical care coverage within our ICU,” Smith said. “We are adding new services, like interventional radiology, to keep patients we would otherwise have to transfer out.”

Pediatric care was a huge focus in 2024, with the creation of the area’s only pediatric rapid care facility at the Southgate Shopping Center in south Parkersburg as part of an effort to expand services into that area.

“We have developed (pediatric) inpatient hospitalists and a (pediatric) friendly ER,” Smith said. “We have a full complement of outpatient pediatric services as well as inpatient.”

They are also connected to WVU Children’s Hospital to be able to consult with different doctors on a variety of special cases.

Parkersburg Cardiology Associates is a part of the WVU Heart and Vascular Institute which has access to a number of heart-related treatments and services that are available locally with doctors who are able to confer with others within the Institute.

The medical center is also working to provide many services to the surrounding areas and smaller community hospitals in the area affiliated with WVU Medicine, like Wetzel County Hospital and Jackson General Hospital. Clinics are being offered with specialists traveling to these locations to see patients.

“We have a rural population where it is important for us to bring health care to our patient population,” Smith said. “It is important not to just concentrate on the patients when they come to the four walls of our hospital.”

The medical center is going to be starting Phase 2 of expanding services at Southgate, which will include moving general surgery as well as surgical podiatry and occupational medicine there.

Vince McClosky is vice president of ambulatory operations, which deals with all offsite and hospital-based clinics. He said they want to take a patient-centered approach where there is more collaboration between primary care and specialty clinics so patients get test results back faster by utilizing technology and internal communications.

“That is a big thing we are focusing on in ’25,” he said.

The medical center has been replacing its MRI, positron emission tomography (PET) scan and other equipment to be able to add new service lines locally as well as do them faster, said Tracy Smith, director of imaging services.

“We have a strong focus on replacing everything in radiology,” she said. “We replaced everything with the thought that we wanted to grow and increase technology.

“That has been really exciting. We can now do more.”

Camden Clark CFO Kyle Pierson said there is a high demand for this new equipment as it does scans in a shorter amount of time, allowing the medical center to fit in more patients.

“Upgrading the machines allows us to do new tests we couldn’t do before,” he said.

The medical center spent $1.8 million on a new state-of-art PET scanner. Officials say it is the only one of its kind in the area and one of only two in West Virginia. It is used primarily for cancer services to detect abnormalities or active disease and rule out potential malignant versus benign tumors and is capable of doing much more.

Tracy Smith said they were only doing “the bread-and-butter PET scans” before. They will now have the ability to get into more cardiac imaging and brain studies.

They also replaced the MRI machines in the Medical Office facility which will provide more detailed scans of things like mammograms.

Some of the equipment replaced was around 15 years old, officials said, adding their goal is to be able to replace equipment every eight to 12 years.

“We work to keep up with technology as it changes fast,” Sean Smith said.

Camden Clark COO Duke Rupert recently came to Parkersburg from the Pittsburgh Allegheny Health Network, where he worked for 27 years.

“Some of the technology here isn’t even in some of the bigger cities yet,” he said. “One of the things I was impressed with was the investments being made here.”

Rupert said the focus remains on taking care of patients.

“People should not have to leave the community for some of the care we are providing and some of the things we are developing,” he said, adding, at this point, transplants and high-end procedures should be the only reason someone needs to leave and go somewhere else for treatment.

For a while, the Camden Clark Ambulance service was running around four trucks a day, officials said. They had been able to increase that to around six or eight trucks a day before adding to their fleet of vehicles and workforce following the closure of St. Joseph’s Ambulance Service at the end of March.

Camden Clark is getting a trauma paramedicine utility vehicle allowing EMS response teams to provide whole blood products in the field in trauma situations. Bleeding can often be the cause of early death in trauma cases, officials said. Being able to treat the patient in the field removes delays in patient care and increases survival rates.

This vehicle should be delivered and in use by late spring.

Camden Clark cut the ribbon Monday on a new clinic in St. Marys, that will include rapid care, X-Ray and lab services as well as having rotating specialists.

Marjean Kennedy, vice president of marketing, development and strategic initiatives, said this is the third year Camden Clark was named one of America’s Top 250 Hospitals as well as receiving awards for cardiovascular, orthopedic, neuroscience, pulmonary, gastrointestinal and critical care through HealthGrades.

“It is all about the way we operate that allows us to have transparency and clarity where we are at different stages throughout the continuum of care and the quality of care we are providing,” she said.

Sean Smith said the awards and recognition are nice, but they are more representative of the quality of care they strive to maintain for the community.

“It speaks to the consistency of the services we are providing,” he said. “We want to be the leading regional medical center known for high-quality, comprehensive, state-of-the-art care.”