CEO says he is surprised by ‘the overwhelming response’
Oswego Health President and CEO Mike Backus discusses the Clay PrimeCare facility, part of Oswego Health, which opened in that suburb in February. He said the practice has already 1,500 patients.
Q: Recently you opened the Clay Clinic Care. Why did you decide to expand to Onondaga County?
A: This is something that I give our board of directors a lot of compliments for. From a strategic plan perspective, our board has had [this idea] on its agenda for 20 years. We’ve said our primary service area is really the Route 481 corridor, from Oswego down to Phoenix, but we’ve never gone across that artificial boundary into Onondaga County. I used this line at our grand opening — ‘patients don’t see artificial municipal borders. They’re going to go where they see high-quality healthcare, get answers to whatever challenges are in front of them.’ That’s what they want and that’s why we did it. When I became CEO in 2023, we enacted a three-year strategic plan with a five-year financial framework. Clay was a definitive part of it.
I think it’s just the very beginning of what we can do in that community to continue to help scale care and also help our health system north of Clay. We were already seeing a lot of patients from that area in our Fulton practice. That’s freeing up access for some folks in Fulton.
Q: The office has been open for several months and you’re meeting expectations, but what surprised you the most in getting the clinic ready and opened?
A: I was pleasantly surprised by the overwhelming response. We really try to be that community-focused health system. The medical staff has jumped behind this too. Dr. Rogall [Andrew Rogall, a board-certified family medicine physician at PrimeCare] is an incredible leader. There’s a little bit of an uptick in energy around our medical staff, not only in Clay but across our health system, because they see us doing something we talked about for a long time. There’s a lot of clinicians who have been with us for a very long time and having them excited about the future of Oswego Health is really cool.
Q: Do you plan on a second one in Onondaga County?
A: We certainly are open to opportunities. We take every expansion through a very rigorous business development but also clinical need analysis. We certainly see that market continuing to grow. We expect our market to continue to grow up here as well, so it may not necessarily just be Clay where we look to expand. I think there’s other markets that we can continue to build our brand and build what we do. So, stay tuned.