UPMC Unveils Designs For 3 New Specialty Hospitals
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PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - UPMC has unveiled its designs for the three new specialty hospitals it plans to build in Pittsburgh.
Following their $2 billion investment, UPMC will have six specialty hospitals in the area. You may be familiar with three of them already: Children's Hospital, Western Psychiatric Center and Magee Womens Hospital.
So, what about the three new ones?
Out of the Uptown soil, UPMC Vision and Rehabilitation Hospital will join the Boulevard of the Allies skyline next to Mercy Hospital. It will be 410,000 square feet.
Surrounded by UPMC Shadyside, the new Hillman Cancer Hospital will sit on both sides of Center Avenue, at a combined 400,000 square feet.
And, on Fifth Avenue, where the old Children's Hospital once stood, just in front of UPMC Presbyterian, the UPMC Heart and Transplant Hospital, will rise. At almost a million square feet, it will have a unique design the eye won't soon forget.
Across all the designs, tied in is a lot of glass and ties to nature.
"The more supportive the environment, comfortable light, the more they can have people and communicate, even if it's with a screen, it will be a better healing environment, and I bet we could prove that improves outcomes as well," said Dr. Steven Shapiro, the executive vice president and chief medical and scientific officer.
In addition to the high technology throughout, all rooms will be private.
"There is ample room for the families to get settled in the room as well," said Leslie Davis, the executive vice president and COO of UPMC Health Services.
The new UPMC facilities will be focused on patient care first, and then the future.
"It's going to create the next generation of science," UPMC President and CEO Jeffrey Romoff said. "Whether it be immunotherapy, whether it be transplation with live donors, and in a way the organs can be tolerated, there is nothing that UPMC is not going to or is already leading the way on."
All three hospitals will start construction next year, but the Vision and Rehabilitation Hospital will be the first.
Romoff says the combination of all six specialty hospitals will make them unique.
"It is unique because we do things at a level of excellence that no one, and I mean no one, in the country does. We are a top 10 academic medical center with a partnership with the University of Pittsburgh and its schools of health sciences. We are a top 10 clinical study and people come from all over the world, but particularly all over the region when they have a certain kind of illness that no one, anywhere, can take care of. UPMC's physicians and faculty rise to the occasion and provide the kind of care of last resort," Romoff said.
The Vision and Rehabilitation Hospital is slated to open in 2021, and the other two are scheduled for an opening in 2023.
