Outpatient Facilities Dominate in Health Care
Loma Linda University is building an adult hospital and expanding its children’s hospital.
PHOTO COURTESY LOMA LINDA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
Aurora HealthCare is expanding its short-term facilities in Wisconsin.
ILLUSTRATION COURTESY AURORA HEALTH CARE.
For hospitals across the country, lower occupancy rates and higher costs have caused health-care providers to reconsider how they deliver their services to their communities. One result is a rise in the construction of outpatient facilities, according to a survey by Health Facilities Management. Due to advances in technology, approximately half of all medical procedures no longer require an overnight stay at a hospital and can be performed at an outpatient facility.
“We’re seeing a shift from a one- or two-day hospital stay to an outpatient setting,” says Jesse Balok, principal at ECG Management Consultants, a strategic health-care consulting firm. “The health-care industry has recently been expanding their ambulatory and outpatient networks to provide health care to patients in the lowest-cost facility settings,” says Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate investment and property management firm. “We’ve seen this push realized in significant jumps in new construction in the outpatient field, as well as innovations in tele-medicine and at-home care.”
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One example of this trend is Aurora Health Care, a major nonprofit healthcare network in Wisconsin. Aurora completed an $82 million outpatient surgery center in Burlington, Wis., in fall 2016. Earlier this year, the company announced its intention to build a $130-million outpatient surgery center and medical office building in Kenosha as well as a $55-million outpatient surgery center and medical office building in Greenfield.
A continuing trend is the rehabilitation of older facilities. “There’s a need for regenerating medical campuses that were built in the 1960s or 1970s [that are now] past much of their useful life,” says Balok.
“Many existing hospital towers of this era have double-loaded corridors and rooms that are not large enough to accommodate newer technologies, contemporary care practices or ‘rooming in’ of patients’ families. Several organizations have [built] or are building critical-care towers—high-acuity facilities which accommodate the sickest patients with bigger medical teams and more-advanced technology.”
An example of an older campus being updated, the Women & Children’s Hospital of Buffalo (N.Y.) is being replaced by the John R. Oishei Children’s Hospital, which is set to open this month. Turner Construction was the prime contractor on the $270-million facility.
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