New Sutter Health clinic planned for Petaluma

The medical office is going in at Deer Creek shopping center.|

Sutter Health is opening its first medical office in Petaluma, expanding the health care provider’s footprint along the Highway 101 corridor.

The location at the Deer Creek Village shopping center off North McDowell Boulevard will be the company’s first “Sutter Walk-in Care” clinic in Sonoma County, said Lisa Amador, a regional spokeswoman for Sutter. It is the fourth for the company as a whole.

An opening date is not yet known, she said.

“The site has been leased,” Amador said, in an email.

The Walk-in Care clinic will give Sutter a new physical presence between its two major North Bay hospitals - Marin County’s Novato Community Hospital and a two-year-old hospital near Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank Center for the Arts. The company has other smaller facilities in the region, including an urgent care center in Santa Rosa.

The Petaluma office will take appointments but also serve patients on a walk-in basis, similar to a typical urgent care clinic, Amador said. Yet while urgent care clinics typically focus on issues like bone fractures and moderate illness, Sutter’s walk-in care clinic will focus more on more minor health issues, screenings and preventative care.

Sutter currently has three walk-in care clinics, all in the Sacramento area. The offices charge set prices for services and accept a variety of health plans.

The company is not the first to seek non-traditional venues for providing primary care-type services in Petaluma. St. Joseph Health opened a new “after hours” clinic on East Washington Street earlier this year, an office that takes both appointments and walk-ins. The location is open later in the evenings than a typical doctor’s office.

Sutter’s walk-in care clinics are also open in the evenings, and close at 8 p.m. seven days a week. The 1,200-square-foot Petaluma office will include a lobby with modern furnishings, complimentary coffee and outlets to charge computers and phones, Amador said.

The location, roughly across North McDowell from Petaluma Valley Hospital, will be staffed by nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants, she said. Patients do not have to have insurance, and an office visit costs $109, according to information from Sutter.

The forthcoming medical office is among the latest tenants to emerge amid the gradual buildout of the Deer Creek shopping center. Anchored by Friedman’s Home Improvement, which opened its doors in 2014, the retail development will include a total of 325,000 square feet of commercial and office space when fully built.

(Contact Eric Gneckow at eric.gneckow@arguscourier.com. On Twitter @Eric_Reports.)

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