Although the ink is dry on the sale of Haywood Regional Medical Center, how much the county will get for the hospital remains a moving target.

It hasn’t take long for the interim CEO of Haywood Regional Medical Center to pick up on the hospital’s biggest strengths: high-quality doctors and broad community support.

Mission Health plans to expand its presence in Haywood County with a large medical complex housing doctors’ offices and a line of healthcare services.

The move is unwelcome competition for Haywood Regional Medical Center. But to Mission, it’s a reflection of “the strong preference that many Haywood County residents” have already shown by traveling to Asheville.

A visiting team from LifePoint Hospital network made the rounds to their newly acquired hospitals in Haywood, Jackson and Swain counties over the past week. They pledged to roll up their sleeves and get to work fulfilling the promises made when courting the community hospitals here to join their national hospital network with a growing presence in North Carolina.

When Janie Sinacore-Jaberg walked the halls of Haywood Regional Medical Center Friday morning, the congratulations were flowing and the balloons flying.

“Our staff is incredibly excited. There are just smiles everywhere. You could feel it. It was palpable when you walked in the hospital today,” said Sinacore-Jaberg, the CEO of Haywood Regional.

Three weeks after a fire in the power room knocked out electricity at Haywood Regional Medical Center, the hospital is fully open and accepting patients. The hospital had already opened its emergency department and business offices back up on June 30 after getting a double generator backup system in place but had to hold off accepting inpatients until getting back on Duke Energy power. 

“We are incredibly pleased with the pace of this process,” said Janie Sinacore-Jaberg, the hospital’s president and CEO. “I said all along that we weren’t going to rush it, and we didn’t. We did everything correctly, methodically and in a very organized way.”

The hospital accepted its first inpatients following the fire on July 10. Because the length of stay for most inpatients is on the short side, patients who were transferred to neighboring hospitals during the closure are not being transferred back, said Christina Deidesheimer, director of strategy and marketing. 

“I don’t believe that we transferred back any patients from other facilities,” she said. “The length of stay for most patients is pretty short, so most likely most of these patients that we have [moved] have been discharged.”

The hospital has not yet finished negotiations with the insurance company, so there’s no word yet on how much of the lost profit from the closure a claim might recoup. There’s also no verdict yet on what caused the fire in the first place. 

“That investigation’s still ongoing,” Deidesheimer said. “We wish these things would happen within a couple weeks, but unfortunately they take quite a long time.”

The sale of the MedWest hospital trio in Haywood, Jackson and Swain counties will be finalized by the end of July.

Duke LifePoint HealthCare, a national for-profit hospital network, will take over Aug. 1, ending a long legacy of local, independent ownership of the community hospitals.

 The Emergency Department at MedWest Haywood is fully online, having treated 180 patients during the Fourth of July weekend. The department, along with outpatient services and the hospital’s business offices, re-opened June 30, 11 days after a fire in the power room shut down the whole building, causing 62 patients to be evacuated to hospitals in neighboring counties. 

Haywood Regional Medical Center is on its way to recovery after a small fire in its power room earlier this month knocked out the electrical system, closing the hospital and causing its 62 patients to be shuttled to hospitals in neighboring counties.

The sale of the hospitals in Haywood, Jackson and Swain counties to Duke LifePoint has entered the final stages but is still several weeks, and possibly even a few months away.