Dive Brief:
- Officials at Johns Hopkins' Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore have filed a certificate of need with the Maryland Medical Health Care Commission requesting authorization to embark on a $469 million renovation and expansion project, according to the Baltimore Business Journal.
- Johns' Hopkins wants to overhaul two existing hospitals and build a new seven-story inpatient hospital, which would include 158 private rooms, four new operating rooms, a helipad, a more spacious obstetrics unit, a burn unit with a rehabilitation gym, a parking garage, a chapel and a retail pharmacy. In addition, all existing Bayview patient rooms will be converted to private in order to increase patient satisfaction, reduce the risk of infection and provide additional space for family members, and to accommodate special equipment.
- Medical center officials said in the certificate of need filing that the outdated space is too small to perform certain procedures and creates a logjam of patients, making modernization essential. If approved, the renovations and new construction would take up to nine years to complete.
Dive Insight:
Small is big on hospital construction. A number of hospital systems are building small satellite facilities, also called micro-hospitals, close to their patient bases. These small hospitals typically accommodate up to about a dozen patients and usually offer emergency services and primary and specialty care.
This trend has a boon to contractors that specialize in medical facilities, as Modern Healthcare reported that respondents to its annual Construction & Design Survey predicted that smaller, more convenient options would remain a growth area.
But that doesn't mean large-scale hospital renovation and construction projects, like the one proposed for Johns Hopkins, are slowing down. At the end of last month, the Indianapolis Star reported that developer Ambrose Property Group had proposed a $1 billion hospital complex for a 30-acre site in Carmel, Indiana. There is no official word on which healthcare system would manage the campus, but the project would include nine buildings, four parking garages and a helipad.
Pediatric hospital construction is also on the upswing, second only to behavioral health centers, according to a survey from Health Facilities Management. A good example of that trend is Children's Healthcare of Atlanta's (CHOA) plan to build a $1.3 billion pediatric medical campus in Brookhaven, Georgia, to replace a downtown Atlanta hospital. The complex will include 20 acres of green space, the 260,000-square-foot Center for Advanced Pediatrics, a dual-tower, a 446-bed hospital and $40 million of new infrastructure that will better connect the campus to surrounding roadways.
