WindRose showcases expanded Franklin clinic

A new era of health care in Franklin has opened its doors.

Inside the newly expanded WindRose Health Network clinic, patients can see their primary care physician if they’re feeling ill, or bring their children to see a pediatrician. They’ll be able to get chiropractic care and have access to behavioral health services.

Soon, an on-site pharmacy will be able to provide prescriptions immediately.

“When we started on this, we knew three things to be true: Franklin was a growing community that was only going to get bigger. There were not enough primary care providers relative to the population of Franklin, so we knew we needed to here. And we knew we were in that building there, we were jam-packed and there was no possible way we’d grow without this,” said Scott Rollett, CEO of WindRose Health Network.

WindRose Health Network invited the community to its newly expanded Franklin clinic on Thursday, hosting an open house to show off the gleaming new structure. Visitors toured exam rooms, enjoyed cupcakes and other treats and learned more about WindRose services.

The journey to the expansion has been long, Rollett said. But officials are confident it will be an asset as people seek out primary care, pharmaceutical, chiropractic and behavioral health services.

“At the end of the day, what I think that campus ends up being is a real asset to the community. We’re not a hospital, but we serve a lot of people,” Rollett said.

WindRose opened its first clinic in Trafalgar in 1996. It was created to provide primary health care to residents of southern Johnson County. An emphasis was placed on helping the poor, the medically underserved and vulnerable residents.

Currently, clinics are operating in Hope, on County Line Road and in southside Indianapolis. The Franklin location opened in 2014.

“We came into Franklin at a time when a lot of the old-time doctors were retiring, and all of the sudden, there just weren’t that many primary care doctors there. We were fortunate to come into town about that period of time,” Rollett said. “Franklin is a growing area, and it just kind of fit.”

At the time, WindRose acquired a building that was small but was big enough for their patient load. But in the years that have followed, the Franklin area has grown, as have their patient count, necessitating a larger facility, Rollett said.

“Our Franklin market is probably one of our fastest growing. We were fortunate enough to have that building there, and at the end of the day, we realized we were shoehorned in there without much expansion opportunity,” he said. “We had the demand, but not the space.”

Rough plans for expansion started to come together in 2019, and the project was officially announced in 2022. Costs were estimated at $3.5 million, with more than $714,400 coming from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), a COVID-19 relief bill passed two years ago. The act provided a wide variety of relief funds including payments to individuals and capital project funding for local governments and federally qualified health care providers such as WindRose.

“That’s when we officially pulled the trigger on (the project),” Rollett said.

On its 3-acre lot, workers built a 13,000-square-foot free-standing addition connected to its approximately 7,200-square-foot building with an enclosed walkway. With rising construction costs, the total project came in at about $5 million, Rollett said.

The expansion includes a new waiting area, an onsite pharmacy, 15 exam rooms, four health care provider pods, three private offices, a lab area and a procedure room. Officials moved their primary care operations to the new facility, Rollett said.

In particular, the pharmacy — though not operational yet — is a critical piece of the new clinic, Rollett said. The new pharmacy will give WindRose the opportunity to provide at-cost drugs to the community through the federal 340B Drug Pricing Program. The program enables qualifying health care providers to buy and sell prescription drugs at cost and without a retail mark-up.

That saves patients, especially those who are uninsured, a significant amount of money, Rollett said.

About 40% of patients at WindRose speak English as a second language, and the new clinic will include accommodations for those patients. Spanish-speaking staff are available as well as resources to communicate with the growing Chin population on the southside of Indianapolis. Signage throughout the new clinic is written in English, Spanish and Chin.

In the old building, WindRose leaders are adding chiropractic services, which will become available on May 1. Pediatric dental care will also be offered starting in July.

The company doesn’t have concrete plans for the rest of the building, Rollett said. But it seems like WindRose will expand behavioral health services and add psychiatric services.

“Behavioral health has been one of our fastest growing areas. Through COVID, it seems like the demand for therapy and psychiatrists has just skyrocketed,” Rollett said.