Geisinger investing $1.8B in major hospital projects

The Geisinger health system is going to keep some construction workers busy over the next few years.

Geisinger broke ground last month on a project that's intended to transform its Wyoming Valley campus in northeastern Pennsylvania, including a new, 11-story patient tower. The project is estimated to cost nearly $900 million.

The Pennsylvania health system unveiled another ambitious project last week. The system announced plans to build an 11-story tower at Geisinger Medical Center, its main campus in central Pennsylvania. The medical center project is estimated at nearly $880 million.

Terry Gilliland, M.D., president and CEO of Geisinger, called it “the largest expansion project in the nearly 110-year history of Geisinger Medical Center.”

The combined cost of the two projects is nearly $1.8 billion. In announcing both projects, Gilliland said they would transform care at the campuses and described a commitment to “making better health easier” for patients.

It’s been an eventful few months for Geisinger. In April, Risant Health, a subsidiary of Kaiser Permanente, completed its acquisition of Geisinger. But officials note that Geisinger has been planning its construction projects for some time.

Wyoming Valley

Mike DiMare, interim associate vice president of clinical operations for Geisinger Wyoming Valley Medical Center and Geisinger South Wilkes-Barre, talks about the project to reshape the northeast Pennsylvania campus with palpable enthusiasm. Geisinger announced initial plans for the project last year.

“We're incredibly excited for this new project,” DiMare tells Chief Healthcare Executive®. “I think most importantly, we're really excited to bring a proper facility with its advanced technology to the community that we serve. You know, we certainly know that the needs for healthcare continue to grow and rise within the area.”

The Wyoming Valley campus is based in Wilkes-Barre in northeastern Pennsylvania, an area which has seen some growth in recent years. But the area also has an aging population. By 2028, the number of people 65 and older in the region is expected to rise by 11%, and the project is designed with those demographic changes in mind.

Geisinger is building an 11-story tower and planning other improvements at the Wyoming Valley Medical Center.

The new patient tower will help boost the Wyoming Valley hospital’s bed count by 60 to about 400.

Beyond adding beds, the project entails shifting patient rooms to private rooms in the medical center’s existing building, and all the rooms in the new tower will be private.

Patients have an expectation for private rooms, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, DiMare says.

“Getting to that private bed model in the inpatient setting is something that we're incredibly excited for. And I think our patients deserve that type of experience when they come to our hospital in the future,” he says.

The Wyoming Valley project also calls for a significant expansion of the medical center’s emergency department, with 22 new treatment rooms.

“That gives us a better opportunity to have the appropriate flow through our emergency department,” DiMare says. Plus, with the increase in inpatient beds, there should be fewer patients waiting for a room in the emergency department.

The plans also call for dedicated space for patients with behavioral health needs in the emergency department. Hospitals across the country have seen an uptick in patients with mental health emergencies.

“When patients come into the emergency department in crisis, it's really the worst place that we can have a patient that has a true behavioral health need,” DiMare says. “So the intent of that dedicated behavioral health space … is to create a space that is much more conducive to their needs than what we have today. So that will be a space that will be very equipped.”

The project also includes 24 new intensive care unit beds and 6 new operating rooms.

The tower is expected to be completed by 2028 and other renovations of the Wyoming Valley medical center should be finished by 2030.

When the project is complete, Geisinger officials say the Wyoming Valley campus will match up well with the academic medical centers in Philadelphia and New York, which draw patients from northeastern Pennsylvania.

“Our hope is, with all of these continued evolutions that we're doing, that patients have the ability to have better health, easier for them, close to their home, close to their family,” DiMare says.

Geisinger Medical Center

The health system’s main campus in Danville, a small town in central Pennsylvania, is also going to look much different in a few years.

The Geisinger Medical Center in central Pennsylvania will get a new 11-story patient tower, parking garage, and an expanded emergency department.

The Geisinger Medical Center plans also call for a new, 11-story patient tower. Megan Brosious, chief administrative officer of Geisinger’s central region, says planning for the project began years ago, and it’s the first major construction project on the campus since 2010.

“It's a long overdue project for this campus, but it's definitely a huge undertaking,” Brosious tells Chief Healthcare Executive®.

An existing clinic will be demolished to create space for the new tower. The construction of the tower is expected to be complete by 2028.

As with the Wyoming Valley project, the medical center is going to move to all private rooms. The rooms in the new tower will be private, and the existing rooms in the facility will be converted to private rooms. The project will add about a total of 40 inpatient beds, raising capacity to 560.

Geisinger is moving ahead with the project as it anticipates more demand for healthcare from an aging population in central Pennsylvania.

“We also have a very large shift in that over 65 population. And we're at full capacity now,” Brosious says.

The emergency department will double in size, and the number of emergency beds will rise from 45 to 60.

Brosious says there’s a great deal of excitement inside and outside Geisinger for expanding and revamping the emergency department.

“We have been in an undersized emergency department for the volume of visits that we see every year for some time,” she says. “It unfortunately is not uncommon for a patient to receive care in a hallway bed. It's not the experience that we want our community to have when they need us.”

The medical center has a pediatric emergency unit, and the children’s unit and adult ER will share the same space in the reconfigured department, but they will be separate.

“We firmly believe that children are not little adults. They have special needs,” Brosious says.

Brosious says the department is designed to meet the needs of patients, but it’s also being crafted to improve the work experience for Geisinger employees.

“We want our patients and visitors to have this improved experience, but it's just as much for our people,” she says. “They deserve contemporary space.”

The renovations to the campus could help Geisinger attract and keep clinicians, Brosious says.

“It will help with retention, because we're going to reduce stress almost immediately,” she says. “The ability to show this place off to a potential recruit … it makes a big difference. But the area that I think it's going to be most impactful is with us retaining learners.”

The medical center typically has 600 learners at any given time, Brosious says.

“We want to grow our talent pool,” Brosious adds. “We want to keep those graduates, those physicians and nurses and advanced practitioners, here with us.”

The plans also call for a new parking garage, which will enable patients and families to have a much shorter walk around the campus.

The project also comes as Geisinger is partnering with Acadia Healthcare Company to build a new, 96-bed behavioral health hospital in Danville. Construction began on that project in May and the facility is slated to open in 2025.