UPMC to construct specialty hospitals
Health system will invest $2 billion, build near 3 existing facilities
Health system giant UPMC said on Friday that it will spend $2 billion to build three specialty hospitals, bringing to $3 billion the total sum earmarked for new health care expenditures in Western Pennsylvania over the next five years.
The new hospitals will be built near existing UPMC hospital campuses: UPMC Vision and Rehabilitation Hospital, a 300,000-squarefoot facility, will be built near UPMC Mercy in the city’s Uptown section; UPMC Heart and Transplant Hospital at UPMC Presbyterian, a 15-story, 620-bed facility, will be built in Oakland; and UPMC Hillman Cancer Hospital at UPMC Shadyside, a 240,000-squarefoot patient tower and 160,000square-foot outpatient center, will be built near the system’s Shadyside Hospital.
By repurposing existing rooms for offices and other uses, the Pittsburgh health system said its construction plans will not increase the number of inpatient hospital beds in a region that already has too many beds.
Perhaps more remarkable, UPMC president and CEO Jeffrey Romoff said the health system, already undergoing a period of rapid expansion, would double in size in five years as a result of the building boom.
“Working in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences, we will radically change health care as we know it to provide personalized, effective and compassionate care,” Mr. Romoff said in a prepared statement.
At a news conference at its Shadyside hospital where the building plans were unveiled, Mr. Romoff said UPMC would change medicine in the way online retailer Amazon upended the way consumers buy goods, saying, “UPMC seeks to be the Amazon of health care.”
The announcement caps a year of unprecedented growth for the Pittsburgh-based system, which has included acquiring a dozen hospitals across Pennsylvania. UPMC, Pennsylvania’s biggest employer with 80,000 employees, now operates 39 hospitals overall.
UPMC’s hospital construction plans could also be the capstone in the long career of Mr. Romoff, who will turn 72 this month. Mr. Romoff began his career at UPMC in 1973 at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Oakland.
UPMC’s new hospitals were