Akron Children's Hospital tops tower in $200 million expansion

Akron (Ohio) Children's Hospital celebrated the topping out of its new seven-story medical tower this month in the midst of a $200 million campus expansion started in 2012.

When completed next year, the critical-care tower will have 369,000 square feet of space, including a 100-bed neonatal intensive-care unit, a high-risk delivery area, an emergency department, a new outpatient surgery center, and an enclosed concourse that connects to a 1,250-space parking garage. The new building is expected to open in February 2015, which would put it two months ahead of schedule and generate about $7,500 in daily savings, according to hospital officials.

The hospital has used a process called integrated project delivery that allows the hospital’s leadership and department teams to collaborate with architects and contractors on the building’s design. They used small scale models to design the floors and then teams conducted patient scenarios in full-scale mock-ups to test the blueprints before construction began.

Public financing and internal resources are being used to pay for two-thirds of the hospital’s expansion costs, with the remaining third covered through philanthropy.

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