Alaska Regional files court appeal against state health commissioner

Alaska Regional Hospital filed an administrative appeal in Anchorage Superior Court on Tuesday, Oct. 6, against the Department of Health and Commissioner Heidi Hedberg.

The docket does not name the decision appealed, but the parties match Hedberg's Sept. 10 denial of a certificate of need, the state approval new emergency departments require. The filing came 26 days into the 30-day appeal window. The link remains unconfirmed until the notice of appeal or statement of points is read.

Judge David A. Nesbett presides. William G. Cason represents the hospital.

The proposed five-bed South Anchorage emergency department would occupy a standalone building at 11841 Old Seward Highway near the Huffman Road roundabout, estimated at $17.4 million in the July 2024 application. The commissioner's decision calls it what would be the state's first freestanding emergency department.

Chief Administrative Law Judge Joan Wilson recommended approval July 31 in a 111-page proposed decision, conditioned on ambulance transport contracts and extensive community education before opening. "ARH has proven a concrete emergency-room overcrowding crisis impacting the entire Municipality of Anchorage," she wrote, citing 2023 crowding data.

Hedberg rejected that finding and affirmed her Feb. 27, 2025 denial. She found the hospital failed six of eight review standards. It passed only stakeholder engagement and location accessibility. Staff put Anchorage's 2030 need at 64 emergency treatment rooms. Sixty-five are certified, 49 at Providence and 16 at Alaska Regional. The hospital counted 52, excluding 13 Providence rooms that are sometimes closed or reserved for particular patients. "Because the Program's calculated need for 64 treatment rooms is less than the existing 65 treatment rooms currently available in the service area, the methodology does not demonstrate an unmet population-based need," Hedberg wrote. She also raised the cost's effect on Medicaid and faulted the hospital for covering ambulance transport only to its own campus.

She dismissed Wilson's estimate that about 1,046 people a year would get critically timed care, citing a chart never introduced at the hearing and a value-of-human-life standard the law does not allow.

Rejecting Wilson's bias finding and her "silencing Alaskans" language, Hedberg said suggesting the department "would take any action to silence the people they are sworn to serve is wholly inappropriate." Of 286 written comments, 251 favored the project and 35 opposed. Staff counted 245 as generic comments gathered by the hospital's law firm, Holland & Hart. Wilson said the office effectively disregarded them. Hedberg called that "simply not true."

This is Alaska Regional's third try. The state denied satellite emergency departments in Eagle River and South Anchorage in 2016 and a 12-room South Anchorage proposal in September 2023, which the hospital did not appeal.

The department now prepares the agency record. No hearing or briefing schedule appears on the docket.