St. Clair Hospital announces $142 million expansion
Rendering by IKM Inc.
St. Clair Hospital’s new comprehensive outpatient center as viewed from North Wren Drive.
View of the outpatient center from the hospital side (Rendering by IKM Inc.)
Rendering by IKM Inc.
A rendering of the lobby of the outpatient center
Rendering by IKM Inc.
A rendering of the front entrance of the outpatient center off North Wren Drive
Photo courtesy of Kathy Jones
An excavator rips down a building on North Wren Drive in Scott Township on June 25 as St. Clair Hospital prepares to build a new outpatient treatment center.
St. Clair Hospital announces $142M expansion project
{child_byline}By Harry Funk
Staff writer
hfunk@thealmanac.net
{/child_byline}
You know what happens when you turn 50. Your physician starts insisting you get a colonoscopy, perhaps on an outpatient basis in St. Clair Hospital’s gastroenterology laboratory.
“That’s a very compact facility,” James Collins admits. “You certainly get to know your neighbors.”
The hospital’s president and chief executive officer is looking forward to alleviating such situations with a $142 million expansion project he announced officially on Tuesday. The major component is a 280,000-square-foot comprehensive outpatient center at the southwestern corner of the St. Clair campus, split between Mt. Lebanon and Scott Township.
“One of the principles of our design, relative to the endoscopy suite and surgery, was to incorporate into our patient-care model an element where the patient and family members have some private space,” said Michael Flanagan, senior vice president and chief operating officer. “Certainly, a much better atmosphere for the patient to recover in, and from a privacy perspective, no longer will they be separated by curtains.”
That’s just one of the perks touted by St. Clair officials, who are embarking on the project in response to a 130 percent increase in the hospital’s outpatient volume since 2006. Two floors of the new six-story building, for example, will provide an additional 184 parking spaces.
“Patients will be able to pull right off North Wren Drive, self-park in the building and not have to traverse the back of the campus to the parking garage,” Flanagan explained. “Everything will be self-contained in this building.”
Speaking of North Wren, the expansion project includes realigning the street to line up with Firwood Drive at the Bower Hill Road intersection, which causes safety issues with its current configuration. Mt. Lebanon recently was awarded $220,000 from a state traffic grant to replace traffic signals at the intersection.
Other major components of the project are adding two decks to the employee parking area to the north of the campus, completed in May to generate 300 more spaces, and construction of a 10,000-foot central utility building.
“This is a project to modernize the infrastructure, make it more efficient, make it cleaner and consolidate it in one location,” Collins said.
Part of the process of designing the outpatient center involved visits to major hospitals throughout the United States, including those in the Mayo Clinic Care Network, of which St. Clair is a member.
“If you’ve ever been to a Mayo facility, all of the doctors and services are organized around the patient,” Collins explained. “We wanted to bring the same concept to Pittsburgh.”
Flanagan described another integral design element.
“We had our front-line staff also involved, our surgeons, our anesthesiologists, our nursing staff,” he said. “They’re at the bedside really helping us design the most efficient patient-centered care today.”
Financing for the project, which is scheduled for completion in 2020, comes from a combination of tax-exempt bonds, government grants, philanthropic giving and “balance-sheet cash,” according to Richard Chesnos, senior vice president and chief financial officer. High credit ratings issued for St. Clair by Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s helped with obtaining necessary funding.
“They both had seen the pro forma and knew the overall content and the size of the project, and also the potential borrowing,” Chesnos said.
In recent years, St. Clair also has addressed higher demand for outpatient services by opening centers in Bethel Park and Peters Township. Some patients, though, prefer to have services rendered at the main campus.
“What we think this facility does now is kind of offer the best of both worlds,” Collins said about the new center. “It’s one-stop shopping, but it also provides the reassurance of having a major hospital immediately available to you, if you’re having surgery or any other kind of invasive procedure.”
St. Clair opened in 1954 as a 60-bed facility. Today, the region’s largest independent hospital has more than 2,500 employees and 600 physicians
“Medicine has changed a lot since 1954,” Collins said, “and so we’re building a building that is forward-looking for not only the remainder of the 21st century, but really for how medicine will be practiced into the future.