Highmark plans to build five hospitals

In a major step toward a longstated goal of “making health care more affordable and keeping it close to home,” Highmark Health president and CEO David Holmberg on Wednesday announced plans to build a 160-bed hospital in Pine as well as four small-scale “neighborhood hospitals.”

Together with planned expansion and facility renovations at Forbes, Allegheny General, Jefferson and West Penn hospitals, the Pittsburgh health care giant has set its sights on $700 million in facility construction, expansion and renovation in the next four to five years.

The announcement came Wednesday in a media briefing at Highmark’s Fifth Avenue Place headquarters, Downtown.

“Our intention was to push care out to the community,” said Cynthia Hundorfean, president and CEO of Highmark Health’s Allegheny Health Network care provider system, whose network of hospitals will grow to 13 once the five facilities are completed.

Combined with earlier announced plans for $315 million in capital investments for AHN’s cancer network and the Erie market, Highmark Health and AHN officials say they are committed to investing more than $1 billion in the system’s provider network, while creating more than 800 new health care jobs in the region and “hundreds” of trade union jobs for the construction and renovation work.

The Pine hospital will be built in front of AHN’s Wexford Health + Wellness Pavilion on Perry Highway. Groundbreaking for the hospital, which will require regulatory approval, is expected in mid-2018 with completion by 2021.

Locations for the four neighborhood hospitals — each of which will include an emergency department and 10 to 12 patient beds for short-stay use — have not been determined, although Mr. Holmberg said the system is scouting the Aspinwall/Fox Chapel area for one of them.

“We want to make sure these sites are exactly where they need to be,” he said.

Officials sounded particularly excited about the neighborhood hospital initiative, which the health system is undertaking as part of a joint venture with Texasbased Emerus.

Emerus specializes in managing micro-hospitals, primarily in the southern and western regions of the U.S.

The four local hospitals also will be under Emerus management and are expected to open in early 2019.

Unlike urgent care centers, these 15,000- to 60,000-square-foot facilities are fully licensed and are open 24 hours a day, with primary and specialty care services