LVHN breaks ground on emergency center
Lehigh County’s first in nearly 50 years, $27M hospital set to open late in ’23
Members of Lehigh Valley Health Network’s top brass as well as local government officials met Monday morning at the border of Lower Macungie Township and Macungie to mark the start of construction on the first emergency care hospital to be built in Lehigh County in nearly half a century.
Plans for Lehigh Valley Hospital-Macungie, to be built at 3369 Route 100 in Lower Macungie, include a one-story, 22,194-squarefoot hospital and a threestory medical office building with 10,182 square feet of office space on each floor.
The $27 million complex is expected to open at the end of 2023.
The “neighborhood hospital” will have 11 emergency department beds and 10 inpatient beds, and features associated with a larger acute-care hospital such as a laboratory, imaging center and pharmacy. It will be staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Brian Nester, CEO of LVHN, said this type of smaller hospital is new for the network and region, and will provide an easy-to-navigate environment as well as lower-cost treatment for patients.
“We know those we serve want the very best clinical outcomes they can have but they’d also like it to be convenient, they’d like it to be nearby — they don’t want to have to go and access care at a gigantic maze,” Nester said.
LVHN expects the hospital will create 50-60 jobs, plus 75-100 jobs at the medical office building.
A traffic impact study found the hospital and office building will likely generate less traffic than the Weis that formerly occupied the site.
Documents submitted by LVHN’s developer, Embree Development Group, stated
the hospital will be equipped to stabilize and treat almost any serious medical emergency. Patients who need surgery or other high-level acute care will be stabilized on-site and taken to Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest, about 5 miles away. Most pediatric patients who require inpatient stays will be transferred to Lehigh Valley Reilly Children’s Hospital, on the LVH-Cedar Crest campus.
An LVHN spokesperson said the goal of the hospital will be to alleviate some of the patient load at Cedar Crest and other LVHN acute care hospitals, while still providing acute care services at a standalone hospital in these communities. It will primarily be for overnight or inpatient stays that only last a few days. LVHN is not seeking trauma center approval for the new hospital.
“It fills a need by creating a health care option not currently available in this region — more capability than an express care, with experience and expertise to treat the same patients that would traditionally be treated and released at a larger hospital, such as LVH-Cedar Crest,” Jim Miller, chief operating officer of LVH-Cedar Crest, said. “The majority of cases seen at all hospitals’ emergency rooms are the treatand-release variety.”
David Burmeister, LVHN’s chief medical officer, said the three key advantages of this neighborhood hospital and others like it will be shorter emergency department wait times, faster inpatient admissions and a reduced length of stay for patients.
The medical office building will be called the Health Center at Macungie, and will house services including HNL Lab Medicine, Lehigh Valley Physician Group family practices, orthopedics, cardiology, pediatric practices, outpatient adult rehab, and cardiac and vascular diagnostic testing.
Township commissioners granted LVHN’s plan for the medical complex conditional use approval in January; the preliminary final plan was approved in August.
The hospital will be the sixth in Lehigh County equipped for emergency and acute care, and the first new one in the county since LVH-Cedar Crest’s completion in 1974.
Though this type of hospital is novel for the Lehigh Valley, LVH-Macungie could be only the first of its type. At the news conference, Nester said the network plans to build more neighborhood hospitals.
Nester said these hospitals will function as the middle path between LVHN ExpressCAREs and the larger network hospitals. He said the network opened its first ExpressCARE center eight years ago, with the goal of providing care for immediate but nonemergency medical needs at a lower cost. Now the roughly 30 centers see more patients than all network emergency departments combined.
“Lower cost, high-quality care in your neighborhood — the expression of this neighborhood hospital is along those exact same lines, delivering value to the communities that we serve,” Nester said.
Brian Downs, a spokesperson for LVHN, said the network did not yet have any projections for potential health care savings the neighborhood hospital model could provide to Macungie area residents.
LVHN proposed another neighborhood hospital and medical office building complex on MacArthur Road in Whitehall Township, but the proposal was rejected by the township commissioners in October over concerns about rezoning the property and increased traffic.
This proposed hospital would have had dozens of emergency room bays and inpatient rooms, and a 60,000-square-foot medical office building. On Monday morning, Downs said the network was still considering options for a neighborhood hospital in Whitehall but had no other information.