Hospitals seeking to avoid being forced to close are embracing a new tactic: makeovers.

The strategy is a last-ditch effort for some hospitals condemned by the Berger Commission in its 2006 report, which mandated closure for nine hospitals statewide and five in New York City. Having largely abandoned their legal challenges to the commission’s ruling, hospitals are negotiating plans with health officials in efforts to preserve health care services in some fashion.

In the case of Parkway Hospital in Queens, which is set to close by September 30, hospital officials said they plan to file a reorganization plan with the state’s Department of Health sometime next week. “We want to and we will remain a health care provider,” a spokesman for the hospital, Fred Stewart, said.

The 251-bed privately owned hospital plans to seek to become a nonprofit entity run by a new corporation, the Concordia Health Alliance. The facility would be called the Concordia Health Pavilion at Forest Hills.

If given the go-ahead, the hospital would also create several new services, including an urgent-care center to replace its emergency department. Plans call for a new diabetes center, a wound care center, and a short-term rehabilitation program. The hospital would create a pharmacy for outpatient prescriptions and offer “clinical model” adult day care, or care that provides some clinical treatment.

Hospital officials said it was premature to estimate how much the project would cost, but they said they would raise private capital to finance the plan. If approved, a reconfigured health care facility could be up and running within 18 months, they said.

“We’re fully anticipating or hoping that based on the presentation of the detailed reconfiguration plan, that we will have an extension that allows us to go into an orderly transition from who we are now to who we propose to be,” Mr. Stewart said.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health, Claudia Hutton, stressed that the hospital is currently set to close by September 30, but she said the department would review any plan that is submitted. “We’re willing to talk,” she said.

In recent months, other hospitals slated for closure have sought similar reprieves.

New York Westchester Square Medical Center in the Bronx, which is scheduled to close December 31, has proposed that its facilities be used to create a 128-bed division of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

A Westchester hospital, the Community Hospital at Dobbs Ferry, announced earlier this year that it would relinquish its operating certificate in order to reopen as a primary-care facility. “Berger did say that the health commissioner could make alterations to the recommendations if he felt it was in the best interest of the health and safety of the community,” Ms. Hutton said.