Maine Medical Center's $512 million expansion will add private rooms, surgical facilities

Photo by Tufts University

Maine Medical Center in Portland announced a $512 million expansion plan this week that will modernize its facilities through a collection of building projects.

Plans include increasing the number of single rooms available to patients, and adding new surgical and treatment areas that the hospital said will "conform to 21st century standards." About $50 million of the total project cost will be invested in primary and specialty care facilities through the hospital's Maine Medical Partners multispecialty practice organization.

The project also involves the replacement of the largest parking garage on the campus, a 1,200-space structure used by employees that sits along the one of the city's busiest thoroughfares, Congress Street. The hospital's main entrance will be repositioned onto Congress Street as a result, a switch from its current entrance, located in the city's largely residential West End.

Officials say about half the project costs will be covered by reserves and fundraising, the other half by debt.

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MMC officials say demand for the project is being driven by a combination of aging infrastructure and evolving medical care standards. Buildings on the hospital's main campus date to the early 1900s, and more than half of the patient rooms are in buildings more than 40 years old; some buildings are nearly 80 years old. In certain cases, as with the employee parking garage, facilities have simply reached the end of their useful life.

The hospital's physical plant is also under great stress because of the changing nature of modern medicine, officials said. Single patient rooms are now the standard, and across the country any new hospital room that is built is essentially "private." This is because many of the less-complex procedures formerly performed in hospitals are now done on an outpatient basis. What this means is that the patients admitted to a hospital today are, on average, sicker than those in the past, according to the hospital; at MMC each day it is necessary to close beds in double, or semi-private, rooms because many patients today are too sick to have roommates.

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Joel Botler, chief medical officer at MMC, said in a statement that the hospital staff is able to prioritize patients and work through the constraints imposed by an older facility. However, sometimes patients have a less-than-ideal experience and he worries about the future. The expectation in healthcare is for major tertiary care hospitals like MMC to see their typical case grow in complexity, he said. Already, MMC cares for patients who, on average, have conditions that are nearly twice as complicated as those seen in hospitals generally.

This growing complexity also has an impact on the hospital's operating rooms and other places where procedures are performed. Older operating rooms are about two-thirds the size of those built today, which can make it difficult to bring in the latest equipment.

In all, the project would add 128 new universal patient beds in single rooms, which in turn will allow the hospital to convert many of its existing double rooms to single. It would also add 20 new operating rooms. The project would also replace the existing employee parking garage and add three new floors of parking on an existing visitor parking garage, providing another 225 spaces for patients and families.

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Half the new patient rooms and the new operating rooms would be in a new building on the site of the existing employee parking garage on Congress Street. The other 64 rooms would be added by constructing two new floors on the hospital's East Tower building, which was built in 2008. The new employee parking garage would be built on land owned by the hospital at the southwest corner of Gilman and Congress Streets, directly across Gilman from the new Congress Street building. The project would also move the Lifeflight helipad from the roof of the old employee parking garage to the roof of the East Tower building, directly above the emergency department.

State and local approval for the project is expected to take a year or more. Construction is expected to take four years.

This latest project is the third major facilities project undertaken by the hospital over the past decade. In 2008 the East Tower was completed, which included a new Emergency Department and space for mother-baby care among other departments. In 2015 the hospital completed an addition to the existing Bean Building that added new surgical facilities.

Twitter: @JELagasse