Part 1: Who's using all the new beds, facilities?

Editor's note: This is the first of a five-part series.

A huge wall fountain trickles with the soothing sound of water flowing over neatly placed bricks, providing a place of respite and peace designed to promote stress relief and contemplation.

But you won't see or experience this particular venue at a publicly funded park or government center. It's waiting to greet all comers near the new inpatient entrance at the Jordan Valley Medical Center as part of a recent $52 million expansion.

Completed in January, the project added 97,000 square feet to the facility, doubling both patient capacity and floor space in a fast-growing area of the Salt Lake Valley. It was the first multimillion-dollar health-care renovation or new facility to come online in Utah this year, but it definitely isn't the last.

By the time the new Riverton Hospital opens in early November, more than $594 million in major medical facilities will have opened or been announced along the Wasatch Front this year alone. This as word comes that Intermountain is now considering construction of a new $22 million, 50-bed hospital on 70 acres in Layton.

Hospital officials say many of the facilities have been in the works for years, if not decades, designed to provide the kind of care Utahns — and people around the Intermountain West — have come to want and expect.

Combined with the opening of the $560 million Intermountain Medical Center (to replace Cottonwood Hospital) in late 2007, Utahns will have witnessed the addition of more than $1.1 billion in major medical facilities in just 24 months, an unprecedented expansion of medical facilities in Utah.

At the same time, Utah's Intermountain Healthcare has been widely recognized — most recently by President Barack Obama — for providing the kind of cost-efficient, high quality care that has made it a national model.

So as tens of thousands of Utahns continue to either lose their health insurance or see their benefits reduced, who is occupying all these new beds, taking advantage of all this new technology and visiting all those new clinics?

One clue may be population growth. Kelly Matthews, executive vice president and economist with Wells Fargo, said the state experienced growth of about 289,000 residents (both in-migration and births) from 2005 to 2008.

Also, Utah is one of only 17 states nationally that doesn't require a "certificate of need," where hospital systems must prove that they need extra hospital beds to keep up with growing demand.