Four months after construction began on a $90 million expansion, Edward Hospital executives said Tuesday they are planning another major facility, this one to meet demands of inpatient and outpatient cardiac care.
The $80 million Naperville heart care facility will be the first specialty hospital dedicated to hearts in the state, said Pam Meyer Davis, president and chief executive officer of Edward Health Services.
The plans come when most hospitals are consolidating or downsizing inpatient services because of advances in technology and a nationwide push toward shorter hospital stays.
But with the burgeoning growth in the western suburbs–and Naperville in particular–Edward officials said they will have a need for about 100 additional beds by 2007, Davis said.
Nearly 20 percent of patient treatment at Edward involves cardiac care, hospital officials said. The hospital expects to perform 400 open-heart surgeries this year, and the new facility would accommodate the anticipated increase that could nearly double in coming years, Davis said.
The 136,900-square-foot heart hospital, which will be on the main Naperville campus facing Washington Street, would consolidate all cardiac care, including screening, labs, surgical rooms and 71 inpatient beds.
Outpatient cardiac services now housed in the Edward Cardiovascular Institute, which opened in 1993, will be moved to the new five-story facility.
“The idea is to have a focused area where everyone there is living, breathing and teaching heart disease,” Davis said.
Additionally, intensified heart screening and cardiology research for new drug treatments and surgical techniques will be conducted.
“We need to not just be screening overweight, over-55 men for this disease. We need to be screening everyone,” said Vincent Bufalino, president of Midwest Heart Specialists and medical director of Edward Cardiology Services.
“Since January, we’ve found 12 people who need bypass surgery just from those walking in off the street. And that is just the tip of the iceberg of how many people have it.”
The recent Naperville Community 2000 health survey found about 40 percent of all deaths in the city were due to cardiovascular disease, Bufalino said.
A community health study conducted by the American Heart Association and area hospitals in the early 1990s revealed that 36 percent of DuPage County youths surveyed ages 5 to 17 had high cholesterol.
“We’ve got a generation now of the McDonald’s generation, who are used to ordering at the first window, picking it up at the second window and eating it on the way to soccer practice,” Bufalino said.
Edward will join with leading cardiology physician groups, including Midwest Heart Specialists and Cardiac Surgery Associates, for the heart hospital. Edward Health Services will finance the project from cash reserves and lease the facility to the joint venture.
The heart hospital will join plans under way on the Edward campus for a $90 million expansion in outpatient services and an $11.7 million women and children’s pavilion, both set to open next year. Additionally, three operating rooms costing $7 million are scheduled to open in September, Davis said.
If the heart hospital is approved early this fall by the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board, the state health care regulatory agency, construction could begin by November and be completed in early 2002, Davis said.
