UI Health Care to start planning $25M+ upgrades to former Mercy campus

AMES — Adding to nearly $1 billion in construction that University of Iowa Health Care is pursuing across its main Iowa City campus and new North Liberty site, system officials this week aired preliminary plans to spend more than $25 million upgrading its new downtown campus to meet their standards.

The university acquired its new Medical Center Downtown through a $28 million bankruptcy sale of the Mercy Iowa City community hospital earlier this year — promising as part of its bid to invest in infrastructure improvements over five years.

In seeking Board of Regents approval to start planning some of that work — broken into at least seven facility-improvement projects on the downtown site — Chief Executive Officer Brad Haws, who leads the system’s clinical enterprise, said the investment will be higher than promised.

“While we committed at the purchase to $25 million over five years, we'll far exceed that in our investments in the facility and in the community as we move forward,” Haws told the board, meeting on the Iowa State University campus, during a presentation Wednesday.

One proposed project would renovate and modernize the former Mercy Hospital’s 14 operating rooms and associated diagnostic and treatment spaces — most of which can’t be used in their current condition, according to Haws.

“We’re really only using four or four and a half,” he said. “To use all 14, we need to improve the lighting, the monitors that are in the OR, and the capacity that they have for the state-of-the-art equipment that we would like to use there.”

Although the UIHC main campus boasts dozens of operating rooms serving both adult and pediatric patients — with another 12 coming online next year when the North Liberty hospital opens — Haws said UIHC is over capacity and backed up.

“We have a lot of operating room constraints on our university campus, so this is a win-win,” he said. “It allows us to create capacity where we are; it allows us to use capacity there.”

University officials determined which projects on the downtown campus they want to prioritize through a facilities assessment by external experts, who found various deficiencies and necessary modernizations “to support the changing health care landscape for facility requirements, regulatory changes, and advances in medical technology and provisions of patient care.”

In addition to the operating rooms, UIHC officials want to renovate a medical office building near the former main Mercy Hospital.

“This project would renovate the entire building in a phased approach that includes floor-by-floor demolition and renovation of existing clinical space to provide consistent provisions of patient care and health care practices, health care facility standards, and applicable codes,” according to the UIHC proposal. “This project would incorporate all infrastructure requirements, elevator modernizations, telecommunications upgrades as well as flooring, finishes, equipment and furniture updates.”

As for the actual hospital campus, a facility-condition assessment ranked by risk the most pressing infrastructure needs over the coming decade — prioritizing life safety improvements, electrical upgrades, roofing replacements, HVAC upgrades, elevator modernizations and strategic technology replacements and upgrades.

Given the importance of parking — and the role it plays in patient choice and satisfaction — the university is eyeing major upgrades to the downtown campus parking structure, including possibly razing it entirely and replacing it with another ramp or surface lot.

  Buy Photo

“The existing structure needs significant repair or replacement,” officials said. “This project would include a needs-based analysis to determine if the structure can be salvaged with systematic improvements to stabilize it or if complete replacement is necessary.”

By way of equipment upgrades, the university sought regent approval to replace or renovate radiology devices — including all the infrastructure and construction demanded to make those updates. A recently completed “radiology master plan” highlighted “code compliant space requirements, potential displaced functions and support services improvements required for the phased implementation of these replacements.”

  Buy Photo

The university already has put out for bid more than $1 million of work for phased roof replacements across the downtown site. As that work proceeds, Haws said the campus is considering a handful of services it might eventually house there, including:

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com