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Expanded Primary Care Facility Unveiled In Klamath Falls

Image of couches in health center lobby.
Courtesy of Sky Lakes Medical Center
The waiting area in the new Sky Lakes Collaborative Health Center

A new $50 million non-profit medical center was unveiled to the public in Klamath Falls on Thursday. The Sky Lakes Collaborative Health Center is jointly owned by Sky Lakes Medical Center and Oregon Health and Science University.

The new health center will serve as a hub for primary care and will be a health care teaching facility for OHSU. It will open for patients in January, 2020.

“This is, I believe, the largest single investment in primary care in rural Oregon ever,” says Tom Hottman, a spokesman for Sky Lakes Medical Center.

The 100,000-square-foot facility will consolidate five existing Sky Lakes clinics in the area. Hottman says the OHSU Campus for Rural Health will offer a chance to expose medical students to rural medicine in hopes that they might continue to work in a rural community.

The health center will mainly serve patients around Klamath and Lake Counties in southern Oregon and Modoc and Siskiyou Counties in northern California.

Construction on the project began in 2016. It cost $50 million dollars to complete.

Erik Neumann is JPR's news director. He earned a master's degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and joined JPR as a reporter in 2019 after working at NPR member station KUER in Salt Lake City.