New medical campus unveiled in Manorville

It's about 10 miles from a windswept open field in Manorville to the warm, glass-enclosed atrium of Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead, where the hospital's biggest gift ever was celebrated Friday.

Nearly 100 people -- including the hospital's top officials and board members -- filled the medical center lobby and watched on a large computer-generated screen as a 6-foot sign was uncovered in the faraway field, proclaiming both the gift and the most significant change ever in medical care in Manorville.

It announced the Gertrude & Louis Feil Campus for Ambulatory Care, a four-building medical campus named by Jeffrey and Eileen Feil, after the Louis Feil Charitable Lead Annuity Trust had just given $5 million to the medical center. It is named for Jeffrey Feil's parents.

The money will help equip and operate the new medical campus, whose first building is expected to open in the spring. It will have a primary care center and offer pediatrics, urology, digestive disorders treatment, general surgery, health education and orthopedics.

When the entire $10 million facility is open in three years, it will employ 300 to 500 people, and see about 30,000 patients a year, according to hospital CEO Andrew Mitchell.

Peconic Bay Medical Center will provide backup services to the local patients, but many treatments -- including for such conditions as broken legs -- are expected to be done in Manorville.

Eventually, the new medical campus will offer even more services in a 25,000-square-foot complex that will also include retail stores.

Developer Charles Mancini, who is renting the facility to the hospital, said it took 10 years for their joint project to get all its needed approvals.

Peconic Bay Medical Center has been looking at outreach programs as a way of increasing services across the North Fork and into eastern Brookhaven. Peconic Bay Primary and Family Care Practices already has offices in Mattituck, Hampton Bays, Center Moriches, Westhampton Beach and Riverhead.

Jeffrey J. Feil is the president and CEO of the Feil Organization, a diverse Manhattan-based real estate management firm. He said part of the reason he made the donation was because "you are able to help so many people so quickly."

Brookhaven Supervisor Ed Romaine, who lives in Center Moriches, said he expects the new hospital facility to serve people in Manorville, Eastport, Center Moriches, Wading River, Shoreham and Ridge. "This will define . . . what health care is in our part of town," he said.