Pictured is an artist rendering of the possible design of a Mercy medical office slated to come to Monroe County by mid-2020.

A primary care clinic in Monroe County was announced Tuesday as part of Mercy’s planned expansion in the region.

Mercy said it is preparing to break ground on the construction of a new on-campus cancer care center at St. Anthony’s Medical Center and that it will construct nine new Mercy Clinic primary care locations.

“When St. Anthony’s and Mercy officially joined together one year ago, and when we first announced the affiliation agreement 15 months ago, we promised to listen to our community to determine how we could best serve everyone,” said Mike McCurry, St. Anthony’s president and Mercy executive vice president and chief operations officer. “Part of what we learned was our community needs expanded access to primary care and would benefit from improved, comprehensive cancer care.”

Mercy will construct a 70,000-square-foot, two-story, stand-alone cancer care center on the St. Anthony’s campus in St. Louis County at an estimated cost of $54 million. The facility will include a connector to the hospital and is expected to open in the summer of 2019. 

Mercy Clinic’s construction of nine new primary care locations over the next two years will provide access to potentially tens of thousands of patients in the community. 

Those locations will be spread from south St. Louis County to Jefferson County in Missouri and Monroe County in Illinois at an estimated cost of more than $20 million. 

The first new buildings, in Barnhart, Mo., and Hillsboro, Mo., are scheduled to open by the beginning of next year.

There is no official location or timetable for the Monroe County clinic as of yet, but Mercy said it plans to have all nine clinics open by the middle of 2020.