The master plan for the facility was still incomplete when University Hospitals Ahuja Medical Center, located in Beachwood in Ohio, opened in 2011, with a seven story inpatient tower. Two phases remained to be completed, including a second tower to increase the number of inpatient beds from 144 to 600. The Phase 2 expansion began in June 2016 and the project team quickly realized that the project details had to be changed.
Since Ahuja opened, the hospital’s Emergency Department has outgrown its space, as other hospitals in the area have stopped providing emergency services. Other new practice areas like UH’s Sports Medicine program grew out of community needs. Instead of adding a second hospital tower to the campus to increase the number of inpatient beds, the designers decided to focus on ambulatory care.
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The second phase is not the same as the original plan. Percival Kane Jr. is the chief operating officer of UH Ahuja Medical Center. Healthcare, both locally and nationally, is moving away from inpatient bed space to ambulatory spaces. “In fact, we have added almost all of the new facilities here as ambulatory spaces.”
