The Van Diest Medical Center Board of Trustees heard an update on the progress at the former Webster City Medical Clinic Tuesday night.

VDMC Chief Executive Officer Lisa Ridge told the trustees that remodeling work is continuing at the former clinic building. The startup date for Hamilton County Public Health has been moved up to Aug. 15, she said, adding that the remodeling of the heating and cooling systems are taking a longer to complete. Public health was originally scheduled to move into the building July 1.

Ridge said that the designs for the remodeling of the new mental health drop-in center and the Central Iowa Recovery administrative officers are nearing completion and are expected to be bid in August. Plans for the west half of the mental health portion of the building are still being developed, she said.

Ridge added that she is working on a memorandum of understanding for the area around the clinic that was not given to the county.

“There’s a piece that we still own,” she said. “We will allow them to use a piece of it for gardening and (the county) will be responsible for the mowing.”

The former Webster City Medical Clinic was given to the Hamilton County by Van Diest Medical Center, following the acquisition and merger of the clinic with the Van Diest Family Health Clinic in 2017.

The stipulated use of the building is to be for mental health services and other health-care related services for the community.

Drs. Subhash Sahai, Sushma Sahai and Anil Sahai opened the Webster City Medical Clinic in 1983. The clinic building has been vacant since the merger with VDMC.

In other business, the board approved a new interim compliance and privacy officer and an interim security officer. Ridge told the board that Information Technology Director Erick Schrier had accepted another position out of state. Ashley Allers will serve as the interim compliance and privacy officer, while Vicky Wickham will take the role of interim security officer.

A retainer agreement with the Davis Brown law firm was approved by the trustees. The agreement carried a flat fee of $14,000 for legal work on ordinary matters for the hospital.

Capital purchase items, totaling $177,258.13 were approved. The capital requests came from the IT department and included software upgrades, firewalls, Office 365 Cloud Migration, a call accounting system and a secure care system.

At the close of the business meeting, the board voted to go into closed session pursuant to Iowa Code Sections 21.5 (1) (a), (1) (I) and (1) (L).