September 25 will mark a new era in hospital building and design as Rush University Medical Center celebrates the groundbreaking for its new hospital designed "from the inside out." The new facility's interior and external shape reflect the input of hundreds of nurses, doctors and patients, whose ideas about universal room design, patient and family comfort, efficiency, safety and sustainability influenced the layout. It will be located at the northwest corner of Ashland Avenue and Harrison Street, one and a half miles west of downtown Chicago along the Eisenhower Expressway.

"From the outset of our planning five years ago, we sought to improve every aspect of the patient and family experience to further enhance the quality of our care while creating an efficient, bright, environmentally sustainable facility with the most advanced technology available," said Dr. Larry Goodman, president and CEO of Rush.

"These goals and extensive input by caregivers, visitors and patients, led to the creation of the design and shape of the building," said Goodman. Representatives of the employees, physicians and patients who served on one of the 48 user groups that met over the past four years to plan the new hospital will join Goodman for a groundbreaking ceremony for the hospital on September 25.

The 14-floor, $575 million, 806,000-square-foot building will house Rush's acute and critical care patients as well as surgical, diagnostic and therapeutic services utilizing the most advanced technology available. It will incorporate a concept called "the interventional platform," with three floors devoted to surgery, imaging and specialty procedures. Upper floors will contain 304 acute and intensive care beds, 72 neonatal intensive care unit beds, and 10 labor and delivery suites. The ground floor will house the McCormick Foundation Center for Advanced Emergency Response, with unique capabilities to handle epidemics and mass casualties. To better accommodate increased visits from the West Side community, the size of the emergency department will be double its current size.

It will be the first full-service, "green" hospital in Chicago. Rush is seeking Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. Among the hundreds of energy efficient and sustainable strategies the building will employ are multiple green roofs for slow release of rainwater into storm sewers, extensive use of recycled materials from structural concrete to interior finishes and furniture, and use of energy efficient systems for lighting, heating and cooling.

The new hospital is the center piece of a $900 million, eight-year campus redevelopment plan called the Rush Transformation, which also includes a new orthopedic ambulatory building, parking garage and central power plant, renovations of selected older buildings and demolition of obsolete buildings. The Rush Transformation is being funded through operating capital, philanthropy, debt financing and government grants.

Perkins+Will, an integrated design firm, is designing the new hospital and other structures that are part of the Rush Transformation. Powers/Jacobs is the firm serving as construction manager.

McCormick Foundation Center for Advanced Emergency Response

The McCormick Foundation Center for Advanced Emergency Response includes an expanded emergency department that will have 60 treatment bays. With advanced biosurvellience technology to detect unusual admission trends, decontamination equipment and the capability to expand to meet surge capacity in times of disaster, the center will bring an unprecedented level of preparedness to Chicago and the region in the event of immediate and widespread emergencies such as pandemics or bioterrorism. Isolation rooms will have double the recommended number of air exchanges with negative air flow to remove germs.

Interventional Platform -Advanced Surgery and Treatment Center

The new facility's Advanced Surgery and Treatment Center incorporates a design concept called the "interventional platform," developed in recent years for academic medical centers where multiple medical and surgical specialists collaborate to treat patients with highly complex illnesses using the most advanced technologies available. Patient care increasingly involves less invasive surgery, more interventional radiology, and a growing role for advanced imaging. An interventional platform groups all diagnostic and treatment procedures on floors that are operated as an integrated unit. Locating these key services close to one another minimizes the need for patients and their families to travel to multiple locations within the medical center.

The interventional platform at Rush is comprised of three vertically aligned floors, each containing 14 operating/procedure rooms, associated prep and recovery rooms, and support space. Each new and larger operating room can accommodate more specialized equipment and technology including intraoperative imaging, microsurgery and robotics. The 14 procedure rooms for interventional radiology, cardiology and neurosurgery will facilitate collaboration between those specialized disciplines.

Only two other major academic medical centers are incorporating the interventional platform concept on this scale into their new hospital buildings: UCLA Medical Center (Los Angeles) and Johns Hopkins Hospital Center (Baltimore).

The John and Mary Jo Boler Centers for Advanced Imaging will be located on the third floor, just below the interventional platform floors, with state-of-the art imaging offering three-dimensional pictures and precise details from whole-body scans to analysis of a single cell. The Woman's Board Heart and Vascular Center will also be on the third floor, offering the latest cardiac diagnostic and treatment procedures.

Patient Floors

The top five floors of the facility will house the Herb Family Acute and Critical Care Tower. The 10th and 11th floors include the hospital's adult critical care units, with each floor having two, 28-bed units. The remaining three floors (12-14) will be dedicated to acute care medical/surgical patients with two, 32-bed areas on each level. Each floor will be laid out in the same manner, the central core is "off-stage" and supports the caregivers, while the building tips are "on-stage" and are dedicated to the patient and family healing experience.

User groups planning the facility considered sight lines to rooms from the nursing station and the number of steps required to reach each room. Each "tip" at the end of the floor contains three nursing stations supported by medication stations, clean linen storage, and charting space. The layout of all patient rooms will be standardized as either a medical surgical room or a critical care room, so that when caregivers enter any room in the new hospital, they can quickly access supplies and equipment.

All patient rooms will be private and offer family accommodations such as daybeds for visitors. There will be 304 beds in the new facility, and Rush will have a total of 720 beds in new or renovated space at the completion of the Transformation project.

The 8th floor will be devoted to 10 labor and delivery rooms and the 72-suite Renée Schine Crown neonatal intensive care unit. These are the only private neonatal suites of their kind in the city, each equipped for an infant's special needs and includes family zones. The immediate adjacency of the high-risk labor and delivery area to the neonatal intensive care unit was designed to facilitate rapid responsiveness during the first, critical minutes of an infant's life. Rush's current neonatal intensive care unit is the busiest in the Chicago area.

Other changes to the Rush campus

The new hospital building will be connected to Rush's current main hospital building, the Atrium at 1650 West Harrison Street. The Atrium building (opened in 1982) will be completely renovated following the opening of the new hospital in 2012.

The Rush Transformation will occur in three phases. Phase I began in July of 2007 with construction on a new orthopedics ambulatory building. Rush's orthopedics program is ranked higher than any other orthopedic program in Illinois and is #10 in the nation in U.S.News &World Report's most recent "best hospitals" issue. Phase I also includes a new parking structure, power plant and underground loading dock and materials delivery system that will be completed in 2009. Construction of the new hospital is Phase II. The third phase will include a major renovation and integration of selected existing Rush patient care facilities including the Atrium and the Professional Office Buildings. This phase will include renovation of the oncology clinics that have been named the Coleman Foundation Comprehensive Cancer Clinics.

When these renovations are complete, the campus' oldest facilities will be removed to create green space on the west end of the Rush campus.

Rush University Medical Center is an academic medical center that encompasses the more than 600 staffed-bed hospital (including Rush Children's Hospital), the Johnston R. Bowman Health Center and Rush University. Rush University, with more than 1,270 students, is home to one of the first medical schools in the Midwest, and one of the nation's top-ranked nursing colleges. Rush University also offers graduate programs in allied health and the basic sciences. Rush is noted for bringing together clinical care and research to address major health problems, including arthritis and orthopedic disorders, cancer, heart disease, mental illness, neurological disorders and diseases associated with aging.

Rush University Medical Center