Wellstar’s future Columbia County Hospital in Grovetown is likely to provide more medical care than for just people in the Metro Augusta area.
The Georgia Chamber of Commerce is looking for ways to protect existing healthcare facilities in rural Georgia, while also encouraging new options. One of those options will be the access to healthcare available at Wellstar Columbia County Hospital near Grovetown.
The chamber event’s panel discussion that focused on healthcare was part of the Rural Prosperity Summit. The event brought together hundreds of Georgia business, political, and community leaders.
Scott Steiner, President and Chief Executive Officer of Phoebe Putney Health System, said rural health care has a number of unique challenges.
“I think the biggest challenges that we face are just long-term financial viability,” he said. “What we really like to do is to talk about what services our community needs. How can we enhance those, bringing in different specialties and physicians? How do we deal with the workforce from a clinical standpoint, certainly from a physician standpoint? But all of those ideas and services take financial sustainability.”
While rural areas face unique challenges, Steiner said similar difficulties can be found in other areas, particularly the smaller urban areas.
Doug Duncan, Chairman of the Columbia County Commission, told ABD that improving health care to the more rural areas west of Metro Augusta was one of the factors in selecting a location for the new hospital.
“It’s closer, frankly, to a strategic standpoint. That’s why we picked this land all those years ago,” he said. “It’s right here off I-20, very easy to get here. There’s also a helipad here, so in emergency services, they can fly folks in. And when you think about the services this could provide, not only Columbia County, but McDuffie and Lincoln, and other counties, we needed this facility. We needed more beds.”
State Representative Mark Newton (R-District 127) is also a doctor, having spent 25 years in emergency medicine. He agreed that the new hospital can improve access to healthcare for people in multiple counties.
The Georgia Hospital Association, in conjunction with the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, shared various hospital challenges related to the very difficult way to make the numbers work. Diverting some patients to the new Wellstar hospital will alleviate some of the challenges.
“This is just an effort to get care closer to those in Columbia County, especially, but also McDuffie, Wilkes, and Washington, and other counties nearby that will be served by this hospital,” he said. “We talked to a lot of folks in the county, and healthcare is something that they’ve been wanting, and it’s a concern they’ve expressed to the commissioners.”
Newton added being accessible and having specialty care, including a helipad to receive patients or transfer them quickly to another facility, also benefits more than just Columbia County.
“It’s accessible to a lot of the East Georgia area. We all represent a single district of 60,000 or 180,000 in the House and Senate, but at the same time, we also represent 11 million Georgians. A lot of those live in rural areas that aren’t going to have something close by, and being accessible by the interstate is really crucial,” he said.
Dr. Dean Burke, Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Community Health, is a graduate of the Medical College of Georgia who spent his medical career in small towns in southwest Georgia. He agreed that rural Georgia faces many unique challenges, with finances at the top of the list.
“The healthcare business model in rural Georgia is broken. It doesn’t work,” he said. “If you tried to go to a bank with that business plan of ‘Here’s our cost and here’s our revenue,’ they would laugh you out of the door. So, we’ve got to use money to transform delivery models in a way that allows facilities to have a margin and stay open.”
The Columbia County hospital is 85% complete. It will have 100 patient beds, an emergency room, radiology, cardiology, surgical suites, and a pharmacy among its departments. Located at exit 190 off I-20, it is expected to open in August 2026.
