When Swedish Health Services took over management of the former Stevens Hospital last year, the Seattle-based health care organization promised to make $150 million in improvements within a decade.
Now, plans for some of the major pieces of that expansion at the Edmonds hospital are under way, including a new emergency room, an expanded cancer center and upgrades to its baby delivery department.
Construction on the first project, a $6 million building for patients to get chemotherapy, is scheduled to begin next month.
The new 16,000-square-foot building is expected to open in February, said David Jaffe, interim administrative officer at Swedish/Edmonds.
“Right now, we’re limited in terms of space in our existing cancer center,” he said.
The new building will be part of the Swedish Cancer Institute on the hospital campus, where patients received 322 chemotherapy treatments last year.
Preparations also are under way for building a new emergency room, which likely will be connected to the current hospital building.
A new emergency room was at the top of the list of improvements being considered at the Edmonds hospital when Swedish took over its day-to-day operation Sept. 1 last year.
Swedish is paying the public hospital district $600,000 a month in lease payments.
Last year, Swedish officials said building a new emergency room could cost $60 million and take two years or more to complete.
Jaffe said the hospital has selected an architectural firm to work on development of a new emergency room, but final details, including its cost and size, won’t be announced for several months.
“Our emergency room is clearly one of our most pressing needs,” Jaffe said.
For years, hospital officials have said that the current emergency room needs to be expanded. It was designed to treat about 25,000 patients, and now treats about 45,000 patients a year.
Final planning and construction will take about two and a half years. When it opens, it would have the capacity to treat about 60,000 patients a year.
The new emergency department would add even more competition to an already competitive health care market in Snohomish County.
Cascade Valley Hospital in Arlington opened a new emergency room last year as part of a new 40,000-square-foot, two-story building.
A new emergency department was a key element in a new $460 million medical tower that Providence Regional Medical Center Everett opened in June.
And Swedish Health Services opened a new satellite emergency room as part of a $30 million medical building at 128th Street SE in February called Swedish/Mill Creek.
Yet the new satellite emergency room has not significantly decreased the number of patients coming to Edmonds, even though hospital officials initially thought it might.
The number of hospital patients treated at Swedish/Edmonds between April and June this year is about the same as last year. In March, the hospital treated 3,977 patients, 173 more than during the previous year.
The hospital also plans an expansion of its baby delivery unit, where 1,100 babies are born each year. The expansion will allow that number to double after improvements are completed in about 30 months, Jaffe said.
The hospital now has 13 birthing rooms. The new unit could take up an entire floor of the hospital.
“We want to give the community an enhanced setting to have their babies,” Jaffe said.
Eight more intensive-care beds will be added to the hospital over the next several months.
And the hospital hopes to have a new electronic medical record system installed by fall 2012.
It will allow doctors and nurses to access patient records at any hospital that uses the same record keeping system, locally or nationally. This can be especially helpful in an emergency, cutting the time it takes for diagnosis and treatment.
One of the immediate changes at the hospital will be using an outdoor seating area as the home for a series of free outdoor summer movies. The first, “Toy Story,” will be shown Aug. 12, beginning about 8:30 p.m.
“We just want the community to have a great time,” Jaffe said.
Other expected building improvements at the hospital include the addition of a bistro, retail space and perhaps even a yoga studio, he said.
If this sounds a little like some of amenities included in Swedish’s new hospital in Issaquah, it might be because Jaffe previously worked as a senior adviser on that building project.
“What we’re hoping to do is draw on some of the concepts and elements (from that building) and incorporate them proportionally here,” he said.
Sharon Salyer: 425-3399-3486; salyer@heraldnet.com.
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