WVU Hospitals plans $322 million expansion
Amanda Steen | Herald-Standard
A construction worker walks toward a piece of heavy equipment at the site where a 10-story tower will be added to Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, W.Va.
Amanda Steen | Herald-Standard
A construction crew works on an expansion project at Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, W.Va. Among the work planned, the hospital entrance will be moved, the road in the front of the hospital will be redesigned and a new patient tower will be built.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va — West Virginia University Hospitals has started a two-pronged, $332 million expansion of its health-care services.
Preliminary work is under way on a $280 million expansion of Ruby Memorial Hospital and work has started on a $52 million WVU Healthcare Outpatient Center at University Town Centre. WVU Hospitals is financing both projects without assistance from the state.
A new 10-story tower, which will add 114 patient beds and 750 permanent jobs, will be connected to Ruby, which currently has 460 beds, to improve the hospital’s capacity.
The tower will be completed in late 2015 or early 2016, but the entire project will take four years to complete, said Alan Neptune, planning, design and construction manager for WVU Healthcare. Construction contracts for the tower will be awarded in late May.
Currently, all but 30 hospital rooms are private. All patient rooms will be private when the project is finished.
After the tower has been built, the emergency department, the Jon Michael Moore Trauma Center, WVU Children’s Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit and other intensive care units will be expanded. The emergency department will be expanded incrementally so the department can continue operating during construction, Neptune said.
“The emergency department is going to be expanded and renovated,” Neptune said, noting that the trauma center is part of the emergency department.
The tower project includes a new entrance to the children’s hospital, which has 85 beds and is within Ruby. A new patient drop-off entrance to Ruby already has been completed, Neptune said.
In addition, the expansion also will result in larger food service and conference spaces and additional elevators, parking and campus roads.
Some work already has been done to make way for construction of the tower.
The Rosenbaum Family House and Child Development Center, which were located where the tower is going to be built, were moved to a new building near West Virginia University’s football stadium about six weeks ago, Neptune said. Demolition of old family house and development center is under way and should be finished in four to six weeks.
At an estimated construction cost of $100 million, the tower is WVU Hospital’s largest construction project since Ruby was built in the late 1980s. The construction cost does not include equipment and design costs, Neptune said.
“As the population of the state continues to age, the demand for our services is going to continue to grow. By expanding, we can address that demand,” said Bruce McClymonds, president and chief executive officer of WVU Hospitals. “With more than 500 (patients) transferred to us each month from hospitals throughout the state, we can ensure West Virginians won’t have to leave the state to receive the highest quality health care.”
Christopher Colenda, chancellor for WVU Health Sciences, said the expansion is also important to the educational, research and outreach missions of the Health Sciences Center’s strategic plan, which includes the addition of 70 clinical faculty members to the School of Medicine over the next five years.
“Increasing state-of-the-art clinical care space will allow us to enhance our 21st century academic health system,” Colenda said. “It impacts everything we do — from research to clinical care to educating future generations of health-care providers.”
Building the outpatient center away from the hospital is intended to reduce traffic on the medical campus.
“Approximately 70 percent of our outpatients come from outside Monongalia County,” McClymonds said. “By moving some of our clinics closer to (Interstate 79), we can provide more convenient access and parking for our clinic patients and de-congest our campus.”
Hospital officials hope that a proposed interchange off I-79 will be finished by the time the center is finished in 2016.
Currently, doctors see 1,200-1,400 patients in their offices in a building adjacent to Ruby, Neptune said, adding that the center will create 50 new jobs. The three-story, 109,000-square-foot center will have 127 examination rooms.
“The Healthcare Reform Act will likely increase the demands for clinic visits, and the current outpatient capacity at the Physician Office Center is insufficient to support any substantial growth,” McClymonds said. “This new facility will meet both of those needs and allow us to better serve our patients long into the future. It’s a win-win situation for us and our patients.”
In 2012, WVU Hospitals’ outpatient clinics in Morgantown received 433,579 visits. By 2016, that number is expected to increase to 536,909 with 25 percent of those visits occurring at the new center.
The new center is expected to house up to 10 clinics including family medicine, behavioral medicine, neurology, cardiology, internal medicine/medicine specialties, obstetrics and gynecology and pediatrics. The building has been designed with consideration for future expansions.