Southampton Hospital Ambulatory Care Facility Opens In Westhampton Beach

Southampton Hospital’s Christiane and Richard Hiegel Healthcare Center, an ambulatory care center that is also the new home of Westhampton Primary Care and Westhampton Sports Rehabilitation, began welcoming patients on Monday morning.

The two-story, 14,000-square-foot facility at the corner of Montauk Highway and Beach Lane in Westhampton Beach features not only those two centers but also laboratory and imaging services, along with the hospital’s 10th office for its own Meeting House Lane Medical Practice.

Both Westhampton Primary Care and Westhampton Sports Rehabilitation relocated from the North Mall on the east side of Old Riverhead Road, where they served patients for the past 20 years.

In addition to primary care, family medicine, physical therapy and rehabilitation, patients are offered a number of different services at the new facility, including massage therapy, acupuncture and various medical specialties ranging from neurology, nephrology and rheumatology to orthopedics, osteopathic manipulative treatment and general surgery.

Marie Alessi, director of ambulatory services for Southampton Hospital, said Monday that the Hiegel Healthcare Center will be convenient for patients because they will have access to a number of different services all under one roof.

“Even if you come [to the second floor] and see one of the doctors up here and they say, ‘OK, well, go get some blood work,’ or, ‘Go get this testing,’ it’s literally right downstairs,” Ms. Alessi said. “You don’t have to say, ‘OK, well, now I’ve got to figure out when to go there’ … and, ‘Where’s the closest one, and when can I go there?’ For a lot of people, it’s hard to get to the doctor sometimes with work schedules, so having those services downstairs is great.”

Patient flow will also be more efficient, especially in the primary care office, Ms. Alessi said, as there are 14 exam rooms and two nurse’s stations, so more people can see physicians at once.

While Ms. Alessi said moving the primary care center had been discussed for many years, plans for the new building—hospital officials were unable to provide figures for how much construction cost—did not happen until 2014. Ms. Alessi, along with hospital spokesperson Marsha Kenny, said the facility will prove to be a tremendous benefit for patients who live west of the hospital’s main facility on Meeting House Lane in Southampton Village, as they won’t have to travel too far for certain medical procedures.

“We need this so much,” said Ms. Kenny, who lives in nearby Remsenburg. “I’m so excited for my community. This is really amazing.”

Southampton Hospital President and CEO Robert S. Chaloner agreed, noting that the facility will also serve as a training site for medical residents. He said he hoped that working in Westhampton Beach will encourage those doctors-in-training to eventually set up their practices there.

“We’re very, very excited about the new center—it’s a really nice mix of services,” he said. “We’re very happy to be able to provide those services to people so close to their homes. I’m very, very grateful to Chris and Dick Hiegel for their support to make this happen.”

The Hiegels, for whom the new facility is named, live in Quogue and, according to Ms. Kenny, were “the donors that moved this dream toward a reality.”