Ochsner Health Systems Plans $360M Expansion
Ochsner Health Systems recently announced plans for a $360 million expansion project at its hospital campus in Jefferson, La. The project will include the expansion of the north, south and west campuses with targeted completion dates in stretching to 2019.
One of the largest parts of the expansion is at the Main South Campus where contractors will add seven additional floors to the existing eight-story OMC West Tower building. Each floor will feature 34 private rooms, increasing total hospital inpatient capacity from 602 beds to 767 beds.
Construction will also double the size of the Gayle and Tom Benson Cancer Center to include 100,000 sq ft of expanded oncology clinics across five floors with more than fifty patient chemo infusion stations. Parking at the South Campus will be expanded with an additional 300 parking spaces. Contractors will also build a new imaging center across the street at the North Campus.
Ochsner will also construct a separate new West Campus on an 8-acre brownfield site one mile from the main campus at the defunct Jefferson Plaza shopping center. The five-story, 60-bed acute rehabilitation hospital will be constructed in partnership with Select Medical Corp. of Mechanicsburg, Penn. Cost of construction for that portion of the project is an estimated $62 million.
The entire expansion project is estimated to create 284 new jobs and spark the development of a healthcare corridor on Jefferson Highway. Ochsner Health System CEO and President Warner Thomas in a press release that the facility is expanding to meet a surge in patients. The Jefferson campus handled 9,000 patient referrals to its Jefferson campus in 2015, more than four times the 2,000 referrals it saw in 2010.
The Ochsner project is one of a number of health care construction projects either underway or recently completed in New Orleans. The $1.2 billion, 1.3 million sq ft University Medical Center was completed in 2015. Next door, the $1 billion Veterans Affairs Hospital is nearing 80% complete construction with a targeted completion date in late 2016.
