An upgrade of Lakes District Hospital, announced in June, was aimed at getting it "sorted" for at least the next five years, he said.
Applications for the contract to manage the project closed last week, and the successful bidder would be appointed in about a fortnight.
The hospital had been neglected for too long, and become "antiquated, out-of-date and run-down" as a result.
Mr Thomson was speaking at the first of a dozen meetings to be held with the public, patients and DHB staff across the district yesterday and today.
Their purpose is to provide the community with feedback on "listening into action" sessions held in March and May.
However Queenstown’s public meeting, advertised in the Otago Daily Times at the weekend, was poorly attended.
The six or seven people in the audience were outnumbered by DHB commissioners and staff by about two to one.
Deputy commissioner Graham Crombie said the DHB had garnered 3500 "bits" of feedback from the public, patients and staff at the two rounds of sessions earlier in the year.
It had used those to draw up two sets of "priorities for improvement"; seven relating to staff and seven relating to the DHB’s relationship with the community.
Commissioner Kathy Grant said when she, deputy commissioners and the executive team did a "stocktake" of the feedback in June, they had "reflected that in the past the DHB had not been as open or transparent as it might have been".
It had also "languished near the bottom of the league table" in its engagement with clinicians.
It was now in the process of transforming its organisational culture, as well as learning to "live within our means".
Mrs Grant said the Southern DHB now expected its financial deficit for the 2015-16 year to be about $2.5million lower than the figure it had agreed on with Health Minister Jonathan Coleman.
Earlier this week Mr Fleming told the ODT the 2016-17 deficit was projected at less than $30million.
Former Queenstown Lakes district councillor Kirsty Sharpe, who attended the listening sessions in the resort earlier this year, said she was impressed by the "promising changes" outlined at the meeting.
"So many good things have happened since the commissioner team came on board.
"We’ve been neglected for years here, and I think they realise they have to take notice."
