Truman Med opens $70 million expansion in Kansas City. More construction is coming
Truman Medical Centers has opened a $70 million medical building on Kansas City’s Hospital Hill designed to give better care for outpatients and women’s health and make way for a growing demand for patient beds in the main hospital.
Patients began using the four-story University Health 2 building, at 2211 Charlotte St., this week.
The 77,000-square-foot building has 60 exam rooms, seven prenatal ultrasound rooms, a skywalk that connects it to the main campus and interactive features, including a kiosk for contact-less check-in, which will help maintain COVID-19 physical distancing efforts.
The expansion was needed to meet growing demand for patient beds at academic medical centers in urban areas nationwide, hospital officials have said.
The move frees up space to allow the hospital to add more inpatient beds in the main building. In addition, the hospital will quadruple its space for the Level 3 neonatal intensive care unit, which provides care for more seriously ill babies, hospital officials said. Construction on the NICU expansion began this week and is slated to be finished by December 2021.
“Our old primary care center and our old women’s health center were located in the main hospital, which is certainly what you wanted to be when the hospital was built in 1976,” Charlie Shields, Truman Medical Centers president and CEO, said this week.
“But we wanted to make something that was a unique experience, highly accessible, easy to park, easy to get in and out of, and a great environment, and that is exactly what we accomplished with University Health 2.”
Previously, the hospital added an outpatient specialty and surgery care center, called University Health, in 2015.
“This is not ‘build it and they will come,’” Shields said in 2018 about the latest project. “This is ‘they’re coming and we need to build it.’”
Though the project was underway when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Shields said, some features are ready-made for the new rules of public safety. For one thing, patients can leave and enter the building “very safely,” he said.
“Each room has a separate entrance for both provider and the patient. We didn’t plan it to be in the middle of pandemic, but actually the way it worked out is a great place to provide care in a very safe environment, given all the challenges we have with COVID.”
The building’s name — University Health 2 — reminds the public of Truman’s mission as an academic medical center, Shields said.
“We are a teaching hospital for UMKC School of Medicine … and we play a big role in training the doctors of the future, and we wanted to make sure people understood that,” he said.
The building’s glass exterior was designed to be more pleasing to the eye than what one might expect in a medical office building. It’s been part of the beehive of construction activity on Hospital Hill, where officials at Children’s Mercy recently offered a sneak peek at their gleaming new, nine-story Research Institute that opens in early 2021.
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