Rick Rasmussen leads Northwest Specialty Hospital’s rapid growth in Post Falls

Northwest Specialty Hospital added its 11th and 12th operating rooms in July 2025, a move executives said would improve physician and patient access and trim surgery waits that could stretch weeks or months. The expansion capped more than a decade of growth under Rick Rasmussen, who accepted the Post Falls hospital’s chief executive job in October 2014.

When Rasmussen took over, the specialty surgical hospital had about 80 employees, four operating rooms and a handful of inpatient beds. It now has more than 900 employees, 12 operating rooms, multiple clinics and urgent care locations, giving Post Falls a much larger base for outpatient and specialty care than it had when he arrived.

The scale of that change was already visible in 2021, when the hospital’s Post Falls campus sold for $67.5 million. At the time, annual revenue was about $250 million, staffing was about 740 employees and the system expected to see more than 300,000 total patients that year. Those numbers showed a health care operation that had moved far beyond the small surgical model it began with.

A 2023 North Idaho Business Journal profile said Northwest Specialty Hospital was founded 22 years earlier as a specialty surgical hospital, but Rasmussen and clinic director Heather Claussen were working to bring care to people where they are. That shift has continued into the wider clinic footprint: in 2024, the hospital said it won Best of North Idaho in urgent care, family medicine, pediatrics and women’s care. Its own materials also say it is owned and operated by local physicians, has ranked among the top 50 hospitals in the nation for patient satisfaction and sits in the top 10% of hospitals in the United States.

Rasmussen’s tenure has been rooted in North Idaho as much as in hospital operations. Born in Libby, Montana, and raised in Coeur d’Alene from age 2, he was named Volunteer of the Year by the Coeur d’Alene Chamber of Commerce in 2023. The Idaho Athletic Hall of Fame also notes his father, Gary, was a longtime coach in Clark Fork and Coeur d’Alene, while his wife, Sharyl, and daughters Chelsey and Kylie have their own local athletic ties. In Post Falls, the clearest measure of his leadership is the hospital footprint itself: more rooms, more services and more care staying closer to home.