Due to improving economic conditions, the University of Michigan will resume construction of the US$920 million hospital in Ann Arbor, a development that was approved in late 2019 but faced several hurdles in 2020 due to the pandemic that led construction to come to a halt. The 264-bed hospital for the University of Michigan was expected to open in the fall of 2024. Michigan Medicine officials said the new 12-story adult hospital will “transform inpatient and surgical care,” create 370 construction jobs, employ 1,900 full-time medical workers and alleviate overcrowding on the main medical campus in Ann Arbor.
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Michigan Medicine said in a statement on its website it will get back to work on the 12-story facility, which was halted in May amid wide-ranging cost cuts to offset projected losses of up to $230 million for fiscal 2020 arising from caring for COVID-19 patients while many non-emergency services were postponed. The new clinical inpatient tower, which will span 690,000 square feet, will be at Ann Street and Zina Pitcher, west of UM’s 550-bed University Hospital, an 11-story facility that opened in 1986, and the Frankel Cardiovascular Center.
“Michigan Medicine is eager to resume construction on this transformative new hospital. We know this new facility will allow more patients to access our care,” said Dr. David Miller, president of the University of Michigan Health System, in the statement. “We are often running at nearly 90 percent capacity in our current hospitals, so we are looking forward to 2025 when we expect this new building will provide us with additional state-of-the-art and patient-centered care facilities.”
The facility was designed with lean principles for the efficiency of flow and responsiveness to user needs. It will include family spaces throughout and space for loved ones to visit in each patient room, centralized collaboration spaces in each patient area to enhance continuity of care, two floors with 20 operating rooms built with the latest technology, and patient rooms that allow for more complex care.
