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- By Chelsea T. Hicks, Osage News
The new Wahzhazhe Health Center is now visibly going up on Main Street in Pawhuska and its doors are slated to open to all existing Osage and Native American patients in less than one year.
According to current estimates from CEO Mark Rogers, the clinic will next treat non-Native ON employees and their families and spouses later in 2025, using the tribe’s insurance policy. Last of all, the clinic will open up to the general Pawhuska community by 2026.
The building itself is scheduled for completion by June 2025. Rogers noted the Wahzhazhe Health Center (WZZHC) does have approval to treat multiple forms of patients, but doing so “would blow the clinic out of the water,” said Rogers. Thus, the wait.
Rogers is calling the three-pronged service rollout a series of “spirals.” He explained, “the first spiral is fixing everything, which is currently being worked on”—and also serving existing patients from the WZZHC. “[The] second spiral is [the tribe’s] employees, families and spouses. Spiral three,” he explained, “will be the community at large.”
“All Osage patients [we currently] service and all Native American patients we now service will be seen June or July 2025” in the new building. “We will have to [move in,] hook [up] computers, printers, phones, assign offices … ready in numerous amounts of specialized medical and diagnostic equipment, move items into those offices, etcetera. … It is a tremendously huge logistical muscle movement,” he said, explaining why the health system cannot open to everyone at the same time.
WZZHC services
The new WZZHC will boast no less than 15 departments, including an emergency room.
Between October of 2025 and January of 2026, WZZHC will get a new electronic health records (EHR) system certified—the ultimate step allowing the clinic to operate at a scale that will allow them to service the entirety of the greater insured Pawhuska population.
Services will move “as-is” to the new clinic in July of next year. That means within one year, all existing Osage and Native American patients will be able to receive emergency care, primary and specialty care, pharmacy services, physical therapy, X-ray and lab services, dental, optometry, cardiology, neurology, endocrinology, nephrology, dermatology, orthopedics, podiatry, infectious disease, and behavioral health (including psychiatry and counseling) services—all in the capital of the Osage Nation.
Extended hours
While the WZZHC will at first open with “as-is” hours, it will ultimately be a seven-day-a-week facility open on holidays and weekends.
Rogers calls the extended hours “PlusCare,” and said patients will start to see the clinic open every day by October of 2025 at the earliest, or January of 2026 at the latest. The delay in expanded “PlusCare” hours at the opening of the new state-of-the-art medical facility is due to “staffing it up,” said the CEO, as well as ensuring that the new EHR system is operational.
Preparing for the opening
In the coming year, the WZZHC is focused on greasing its internal wheels.
Currently, the health system is still transitioning from the tribe to a standalone enterprise—and that means an ongoing focus on repairing, updating and improving revenue cycle management, space, operations and infrastructure.
Rogers is excited for the new clinic to be open to employees of the tribe and their families and dependents, he said, because servicing this group will help “[recuperate] the tribe’s investment in health insurance expenditures.”
Between now and 2026, the WZZHC will tackle three big transitions that will fully set them up to provide care to all who have health insurance. That is, they’ll undergo a process of getting new accreditation, finalize their new EHR system, which is crucial to billing and treating non-Native patients, and finally, they’ll get fully credentialed with multiple insurers.
The final stage of the new clinic’s operations—full, open access to services by the community, including Native and non-Native, seven days a week—will be quite a transformation from the look, feel and scale of the current WZZHC.
Those experiencing the new health center first will be its existing Osage and Native American patients.
If you are an enrolled Osage or Native American, and want to receive care at the WZZHC, call (918) 287-9300 and press 4 or visit 715 Grandview Avenue, Pawhuska, OK 74056 between 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. See more at
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