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By Christine Graf
OrthoNY has relocated its Clifton Park office to a newly constructed $6.9 million building at 1768 Route 9.
The state-of-the-art 40,000-square-foot square foot facility had its ribbon cutting at the end of October. The practice previously operated a Clifton Park office out of a 5,000-square-foot leased space in the Ellis building on Sitterly Road.
The new Clifton Park location offers clinical orthopedic care, walk-in urgent care, and physical therapy. It also houses a spine center that provides both comprehensive care and pain management procedures.
Officials said patients are able to receive epidural steroid injections and other treatments in the spine center’s on-site procedure suite. This eliminates the need for them to travel to ambulatory surgery centers or hospitals to receive these treatments. The Route 9 location also provides on-site imaging services including MRIs. It is the only one of OrthoNY’s locations to offer such a comprehensive range of services.
“We are able to offer all of our services under one roof, and we have a surgery center that is one mile away,” said Chief Operating Officer Michele Brinkman.
The surgery center is located at 16 Maxwell Drive in Clifton Park. That $5.3 million center opened in 2018.
According to Brinkman, doctors from OrthoNY’s three “hubs”—Albany, Saratoga, and Schenectady—are now able to see patients in Clifton Park.
“When we were in the Ellis building, there was a small group of physicians seeing patients out of that office. With this building being much larger, it allows physicians from all of those regions to come and see patients,” he said.
Because the Clifton Park building was still under construction when the COVID-19 pandemic began, OrthoNY was able to add permanent COVID-related modifications to the interior of the building.
“We added glass barriers at our check in/check out counters. We added separators between our waiting room chairs and at our break room tables. They are built-in permanent fixtures,” said Brinkman. “This added about $30,000 in cost.”
OrthoNY saw a decline in visits at the beginning of the pandemic when elective surgeries were halted. The practice has now returned to its normal volume. They continue to operate with all COVID safety and social distancing procedures in place.
“We never lifted most of our restrictions from the spring time,” said Brinkman. “For example, we only allow the patient in the building unless they are a minor or need physical assistance.”
Due to a spike in COVID, OrthoNY will be implementing changes to operations.
“As things started opening up, we had some in-person meeting, but we are now fully virtual again. We also have PA students who are finishing up rotations, but we will be on pause with those programs the first or second week in December while there is this spike going on,” said Brinkman.
With the addition of the Route 9 property, OrthoNY now owns four of its locations. The others are in Albany, Saratoga, and Malta. That number will increase to five after the practice completes renovations to a building in Schenectady, officials said. By January 2022, OrthoNY hopes to relocate its Schenectady office to that space.
“We still do lease satellite locations,” said Brinkman. “They are the smaller 5,000 square feet or less where we have presences in communities but don’t need a 40,000-square-foot building.”
OrthoNY has approximately 400 employees throughout the Capital Region. Fifty new employees were hired for the new Clifton Park office and that number is expected to grow, Brinkman said.