Ryan Heinonen, CEO of UP Health - Portage, speaks during Wednesday’s Wake up Keweenaw breakfast Wednesday. (Garrett Neese/Daily Mining Gazette)

HOUGHTON — The capital improvements at UP Health – Portage this year add up to nearly $10 million — part of $60 million in investments over the past 10 years. 

“It’s been really great for the hospital and the community and we’re just continuing to upgrade,” said Ryan Heinonen, CEO of UP Health System – Portage. “New equipment, provide better care.”

Heinonen spoke about the additions, and other aspects of the hospital’s operations, at Wednesday’s Wake Up Keweenaw breakfast.

The front entrance parking lot accounts for $2.54 million. The hospital’s gotten positive feedback from the eight handicapped spaces added near the entrance this summer, Heinonen said.  

The “horseshoe” of pavement under the pavilion at the entrance is also heated now, which will prevent ice from forming — and people heading in from incurring another injury. 

“If you’ve been to the Calumet clinic, you’ll see that that’s dry pavement all winter,” he said. “It’ll be the same here. We get a lot of wind and snow up there on the hill, and it’ll be a real positive for patients.”

In the last of the parking lot upgrades, the lot itself will be repaved next spring. 

Another $4.1 million is coming from the expansion of the kitchen at PortagePointe, the hospital’s 60-bed long-term care facility. Groundbreaking there will start next week, Heinonen said. 

The $700,000 remodel at the emergency department added three more rooms. 

A recent high-profile addition, the Da Vinci surgical robot, cost $2.5 million. The robot-assisted surgery performs more precise surgeries that can aid in recovery time. 

Two surgeons — obstetrician gynecologist Evon Schexnaydre and general surgeon Timothy Sears — are using the procedure so far. Three more will be trained by this time next year, Heinonen said. 

“Physicians today, coming out of their residency program — your OBGYN, your general surgeon, your urologist — 95% of them are trained on this, and they want to go practice in a place that has this,” Heinonen said. 

Recruiting and retaining physicians has been a challenge, Heinonen said. In recent years, Portage has adjusted its strategy. 

“I think we kind of tried to hide the weather — we’d do interviews in the summer,” he said. “…We don’t do that anymore. We really have to focus on ‘This is what it’s like.'” 

They get to lean into the universal positives — great community, great schools. 

But they also don’t flinch from the potential dealbreakers. 

“We get 300 inches of snow,” Heinonen said. 

To improve their chances of recruiting, Portage also looks at local physicians. They’ve reached out to pre-med students at Michigan Technological University, or students in medical school. 

Two orthopedic surgeons on their way to Portage illustrate the point. An Ishpeming native will start at Portage once he finishes his residency in about 15 months. Another one is starting there in two-and-a-half years.

“We were in contact with them early in medical school before they had entered residency, so that is really our strategy to get people: to get in contact early so that they want to come back, so they have a path to come back here,” Heinonen said. 

The focus on making it a good place to work has also shown up in the low turnover rate, Heinonen said. 

Employee turnover rate is at 15% this year, about half the industry standard of 30%. For registered nurses, the gap is even more pronounced, Heinonen said — 8%, versus the industry rate of 28%.