Friday, February 26, 2016
LifeBridge Health on Friday will open a $5 million patient building in Randallstown, the first phase of a campus expansion for the system’s Northwest Hospital that is intended to broaden LifeBridge’s role as a community health provider in Baltimore County.
The 13,800-square-foot Liberty Center, located at 8600 Liberty Road, houses an ExpressCare urgent care center and offices for primary care doctors and specialists. The building is part of a larger campus expansion at Northwest Hospital that is expected to cost between $20 million and $25 million.
The expansion plan also calls for a 45,000-square-foot medical building that will focus on chronic health conditions, such as heart failure, diabetes and pulmonary disease. A new health education program that LifeBridge is developing with Baltimore County Public Schools will be based there, as well.
“The Liberty Center is the beginning of what I consider a transformation,” said Northwest Hospital President Brian White.
Hospitals are under significant pressure from the state’s new system for regulating hospital revenue and the federal Affordable Care Act to increase access to preventive and primary health care services, as a way to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations. With this expansion project — focused entirely outside the hospital itself — LifeBridge is looking to make sure its patients have access to those services.
The primary care, lab testing, and chronic disease management coming to the community through the project may “seem kind of casual,” White said.
“But they don’t exist in the community,” he said.
ExpressCare is the lead tenant of the Liberty Center, with 4,600 square feet on the first floor of the building. The urgent care clinic includes eight exam rooms, an on-site X-ray machine and will offer some laboratory testing. The center will be open seven days a week and begins seeing patients Feb. 29.
The Liberty Center renovation expanded the existing 8,000-square-foot building to 13,800 square feet. The additional space will go toward more doctor’s offices, including a pediatrician.
The 45,000-square-foot building to come next will be a much larger undertaking, White said.
The health system has acquired two outdated office buildings and two distressed houses between the Liberty Center and Northwest Hospital, and will demolish all four to build the new medical building in their place.
That project and a timeline for construction are still in development.
In addition to Northwest Hospital, LifeBridge Health includes Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center and Hospital, and Carroll Hospital, which the system acquired in 2014.
Source : bizjournals.com
