A Tennessee-based health care company has acquired Patrick County’s long-vacant hospital property, with plans to reopen the facility as a full-service hospital with an emergency department.
The purchase by Braden Health follows years of repeated delays and unmet assurances made by the previous owner, Foresight Health. Foresight, which bought the property in 2022, had pledged to reopen the facility, but these plans never materialized. Eventually, all efforts to complete the project stopped following embezzlement charges against the company’s CEO.
Braden Health formed in 2008 as a consulting company and in 2020 started acquiring rural hospitals that were on the brink of closure or, in some cases, had already closed, said Kyle Kopec, the company’s chief operating office.
Over the last four years, the company has reopened about 180 critical-access hospitals across the country, he said, but the Patrick County hospital will be the company’s first project in Virginia.
“We’re super excited to get the hospital open and bring a proven model with several profitable examples to this area of Virginia and get services going as quickly as we can,” Kopec said.
In 2022, Del. Wren Williams, R-Patrick County, sponsored a bill in the General Assembly that maintained the former hospital’s license as a critical-access hospital. The bill passed with unanimous support and was signed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The license is still valid, Williams said.
Braden Health representatives said the company plans to reopen the hospital in Stuart with the same designation, which means it will have an emergency department, a key feature that residents have clamored for for years.
The license will allow for a hospital with 25 acute beds, CT and X-ray capabilities, a surgery center and emergency room services.
Patrick County residents are cautiously optimistic about the prospect of the hospital reopening, Williams said. He encouraged constituents to avoid being pessimistic about the new company.
“I know what their plans are and what their strategy is with the federal government and the incentives that rural hospitals have already had but also are starting to receive from the federal government,” Williams said.
Williams has fought to reopen the hospital over the last few years, and he worked closely with the previous owner of the 10-acre property, Foresight Health.
Shortly after Foresight purchased the site in 2022, representatives from Braden Health contacted Williams, hoping to get involved in the project.
“We were always working on opportunities to see if we could transition from Foresight over to Braden Health because Foresight’s project wasn’t coming to fruition, so we were trying to figure out a way to make that happen,” Williams said.
Foresight wasn’t interested in partnering with or transitioning the work to Braden Health, Williams and Kopec said.
Foresight officials initially said the company would renovate the property and reopen it as an emergency department, but after multiple missed deadlines, they said that the service would be too expensive to operate in the rural community.
As Foresight struggled to make progress on renovating the building, it sold the property to another Chicago-based LLC, Wolf of Wabash, in March 2024 with plans to lease it back and use the proceeds of the sale to modernize the building and open a behavioral health and substance abuse program.
In July, however, the CEO of Foresight was indicted on embezzlement charges in Chicago. Wolf of Wabash, which had purchased the property for $2.1 million, put it up for auction in September.
Braden Health bought the property soon after for about $599,000, Kopec said.
The critical-access hospital, once called Pioneer Community Hospital, closed in 2017 after filing bankruptcy and has been vacant since then.
Over the last few weeks, construction companies have started assessing the property for restoration work. Kopec said he visited it this week.
“As far as the facility goes, you know, it’s not the worst. I’ve seen a lot worse,” he said.
The largest hurdles will be installing a new heating, ventilation and air conditioning system and redoing the sewer system, Kopac said. Mold and asbestos removal is also needed.
While Foresight Health started the process for asbestos removal, Kopec said there’s no documentation to show that it was completed.
As construction crews finish assessing the structural condition of the building over the next few weeks, the company will have a better idea of a timeline for the reopening of the hospital.
“We own operational critical-access hospitals in areas much smaller than this and with worse payer mixes and in states that are not as friendly when it comes to things like Medicaid,” Kopac said. “This is actually a very good target for us as far as our internal metrics go.”
