About Lakes Regional Healthcare

HISTORY

Lakes Regional Healthcare (LRH) opened its doors in 1959, known then as Dickinson County Memorial Hospital. Over the last six decades, the organization has expanded in several ways. We started as a hospital that employed a relatively small number of people and provided emergency and inpatient care. We now provide a breadth of services in various ways – inpatient care, outpatient care, home care, telehealth, and more. Today LRH employs over 300 individuals in various professional and support staff positions. In addition, the medical staff consists of 250 practitioners, of which over 200 are physicians. Also, roughly 50 volunteers donate time in providing patient comfort and in fund raising activities. In all, we are honored to provide care for others, enjoy being a positive influence within the communities we serve, and look forward to creating a healthy future for the Iowa Great Lakes region.

YOUR COMMUNITY HOSPITAL

We are proud to be your community hospital. We keep a close eye on how healthcare is changing and our size allows us to quickly adapt and respond to new technologies and processes compared to larger facilities. For example, we were the first hospital in northwest Iowa, southwest Minnesota, and southeast South Dakota to provide robotic-assisted orthopedic surgery. And now we’re the only hospital in northwest Iowa and southwest Minnesota to provide comprehensive robotic-assisted surgeries with both our Mako orthopedic robot and our daVinci robot for urological, gynecological and general surgeries.

As a community hospital, we provide a more personal level of care to our patients, because our patients are those we personally know and love – our friends, our neighbors, our families. We want you to feel comfortable receiving care here. It’s important for us to maintain your trust. We want you to be proud of us. For these reasons, we take our work seriously and are honored to be the only hospital in northwest Iowa and southwest Minnesota to receive 5 stars – the best possible rating – by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Hospital Compare website. The overall rating summarizes a variety of measures, reflecting common conditions that hospitals treat, such as heart attacks or pneumonia, and shows how well each hospital performed, on average, compared to other hospitals in the United States. Specifically, there are six broad categories reviewed that include patient experiences, timely and effective care, complications and death, unplanned hospital visits, psychiatric unit services, and payment and value of care. Our 5-star rating speaks to the quality of our physicians, staff, and support of our Board in demanding transparency and a commitment to quality.

We are your hometown hospital for the Iowa Great Lakes community, and we take great enjoyment in being involved in and supportive of our community. You can see us at events year-round, such as providing healthcare at sporting events, promoting healthy eating at farmers markets, providing education at area business health fairs or within school classrooms, and waving to you at local parades. People in the Iowa Great Lakes are our people. We live beside you, enjoy spending time with you, support and encourage you, and are honored to care for you.