2 Largest Hospital Chains Vie for Edge in Westlake Area

America’s two largest hospital chains are gearing up for a battle royal in the Westlake area, each scrambling to tap a market left wide open when the Westlake Medical Center closed in 1996.

The country’s biggest chain, Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp., may reopen the vacant Westlake Medical Center, possibly turning it into a 24-hour urgent-care center or a women’s hospital, officials said.

The move--a dramatic reversal of the company’s earlier decision to close the facility because it wasn’t making money--would follow a $6-million emergency-room expansion planned for Columbia’s Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks by late 1999, said hospital spokeswoman Kris Carraway-Bowman.

At the same time, America’s second-largest chain, Tenet Healthcare Corp. of Santa Barbara, is planning to open its own urgent-care center less than two miles away from the closed hospital, according to spokesman Brandon Edwards. The Tenet urgent-care center at 971 Westlake Blvd. will be open by late April, and its staff will include at least two physicians.

“We’ll go forward with our plans and wait to see what Columbia does,” Edwards said Thursday. “That’s their business. This is ours. We’ll wait to see how it shakes out.”

Edwards said Tenet may consider opening another full-service hospital in the area.

“Apart from the urgent-care center, the corporation is also looking for land to develop a surgery center and possibly an out-patient service facility,” he said. “Those two would be the precursors for the development of a hospital, if the demand warrants.”

A few years ago, Westlake Village residents and city officials fumed that Columbia had left them out in the cold by closing the medical center.

Bill Nolan, associate administrator at Los Robles, said the decision to examine reopening the Westlake Medical Center is not in response to any immediate plans by Tenet. But he acknowledged there are strong public feelings about closure of Westlake Medical Center.

If Columbia does reopen the 126-bed Westlake Village site, at 4415 Lakeview Canyon Road, the company would reverse its previous stance. Columbia bought the 20-acre site in 1995 and promised not to make any major changes. However, officials shut the facility a year later, saying that Los Robles Regional Medical Center was equipped to absorb new patients from the Westlake Village area.

Now, Nolan said, Los Robles is finding itself at capacity, and opening a new medical facility in Westlake Village could help lessen the load, Nolan said.

Columbia currently operates hospitals in Thousand Oaks and West Hills, in the northwest San Fernando Valley, along with Los Robles Medical Center’s East Campus facility at 150 Via Merida in Thousand Oaks. The East Campus site includes a 46-bed transitional care center, an 11-bed acute-injury rehabilitation facility and a 19-bed geriatric psychiatry unit.

Carraway-Bowman said the vacant, one-story medical center--with its Spanish adobe-style architecture and red-tiled roof--would be an ideal site for a 24-hour urgent-care center operating in conjunction with the Los Robles emergency room, a women’s or children’s hospital, or maybe an out-patient diagnostic center.