Augusta Health shining anew

Gray clouds persist in spreading ethereal gloom, but not in blocking the sun, which shines again today over the central Valley oblivious to conditions meteorological and economic. This time, the light emanates from a familiar source, the Augusta Medical Center, now known as Augusta Health. The regional hospital, which long has prospered in the vanished wake of a clash over its emergence, is on the move.

AMC brandished a new name and logo Wednesday in advance of a weekend health fair that will serve in no small part as a celebration of its 15 years in business. Time sometimes fails as an elixir, but it has been rejuvenating in the case of the Fishersville hospital, which steadily has emerged as one of the leading facilities of its kind. That, combined with an intense community focus, has obfuscated the once-thick rancor over the consolidation of beloved community hospitals in Staunton and Waynesboro.

So now Augusta Health is setting its sights higher, aiming to secure its place in the regional health care market and stretch it. In the peculiar vernacular of marketing, rebranding is the favored term at Augusta Health to describe that in which the hospital is engaged.

This connotes a varnishing of image, which surely applies here and is needed. Augusta Health’s market position is far more deeply entrenched than many people realize. It operates a vast array of specialty offices and practices throughout the region that many people fail to connect with the AMC operation because the hospital’s name and logo, in other words, its brand, are not attached. During a meeting in an AMC boardroom Wednesday, joking comparisons were made to Augusta and its affiliated operations wearing the look of racecars, spattered with sponsor emblems.

That will be fixed, with the new Augusta Health label appearing everywhere the nonprofit operates, giving the feel of sudden ubiquity. But Augusta’s branding initiative is part of something clearly larger.

In the last six months, hospital officials have:

n announced plans to hire three cardiologists to perform interventional procedures previously done by a University of Virginia Medical Center physician

n opened an internal medicine practice in Crozet roughly a dozen miles from the U.Va. Medical Center’s doors

n formed a specialty group made up of 41 physicians with plans to increase that number by 50 and open additional facilities by 2014, according to an online job posting.

It requires a reading of tea leaves from which we’ll refrain to discern the implications of these moves in the richly competitive realm of health care. What is plain enough is that Augusta Health is deep in the midst of the most intense repositioning of its short history. For the central Shenandoah Valley, that is an especially good thing.

In addition to enhanced care, services and access, all right here rather than somewhere over the mountains or off the interstates, Augusta Health will be generating jobs and pulling more people into the Valley. That all follows on recent announcements regarding cinema and retail developments in Waynesboro and Augusta County and the $40-million project to make over the South River Complex in the River City.

We’ll be watching with interest the evolution of Augusta Health and the strategic maneuvering that guides it. In the meantime, we cheer the continued economic stirring. That sound we hear amid the fall of raindrops is of life, and it is sweet indeed.