Open for Business: Eastside Endoscopy Center Issaquah

The Eastside Endoscopy Center recently expanded from its facility in Bellevue to include a second location in Issaquah, at 1301 4th Ave. NW.

The center, which provides outpatient endoscopy services including colonoscopy, upper endoscopy, and flexible sigmoidoscopy, is owned by a group of doctors from both the Overlake Internal Medicine Associates and Northwest Gastroenterology Associates.

Eastside Endoscopy Center and its affiliated physicians have been operating in the Bellevue area for 20 years and provides an alternative to hospital-based endoscopic procedures.

The center started seeing patients in February in its new facility, said Michelle Steele, the center’s nurse administrator. She said the group wanted to wait to get settled in its new space before marking the opening, and to plan its event to coincide with Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, which is in March. The Eastside Endoscopy Center is holding an open house with wine and hors d'ouevres today, March 28, from 4 – 7 p.m. in the new Issaquah Medical Building to give the public a chance to see its new location.

It’s staffed by six employees, including experienced clinicians, including a nurse anesthetist, who transferred from the Bellevue location. Currently, as the center ramps up operations, it has one endoscopy room in use, with the ability to open a second room as needed, doubling its patient capacity. Steele said that when that happens, the number of staff will likely double as well.

A number of the doctors who see patients in the Issaquah location have also moved their offices to the building, making pre-screening and follow up convenient for patients, Steele said.

Steele said in addition to being conveniently located for Eastside patients, the center offers telephone screening where appropriate, to save patients the time it would normally take to have an office visit with the physicians in the group before scheduling a procedure that a primary physician has ordered.

The Center takes up about 4,700 square feet of the 71,000-square-foot Issaquah Medical Building, constructed by Sea Con LLC, of Issaquah. The building has an additional 37,000 square feet of parking, according to county property records. Other plans in development for remaining space in the facility include an outpatient surgery center, which might become a shared facility for local surgeons, and possible shared medical office space, for doctors with practices elsewhere who wish to see patients in Issaquah but don’t need to be on site every day.

As part of an agreement with the developers, the city of Issaquah extended Fourth Avenue NW under Interstate 90, between Gilman Boulevard and SE 56th Street. The I-90 undercrossing opened for traffic in December, 2010.