Healthy City: Inside New York City's Hospital Building Boom
Hospital Construction 2013-2015: A Robust Market Adapts to Changes in Healthcare
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| New York Methodist Hospital Center for Community Health |
The Building Congress surveyed hospital spending on construction from 2013 through 2015. The eight healthcare systems and two independent hospitals who responded invested $4.9 billion during this time to improve and expand their institutions. Overall, the Building Congress estimates that total hospital construction activity — including non- respondent hospitals — topped $2 billion in each of these years, for more than $6 billion dollars expended over the three-year period.
Of these totals, New York's two largest teaching hospitals and their affiliated institutions — NYU Langone and NewYork-Presbyterian — each spent $500 to $600 million on construction activity in both 2014 and 2015. The public NYC Health + Hospitals system and the private Montefiore Health System invested between $100 and $200 million in those years, while the independent Hospital for Special Surgery invested nearly $60 million in 2015.
"The healthcare construction market has been and should continue to be robust," observed Jeffrey Brand, Principal and National Healthcare Leader for Perkins Eastman Architects. "Hospitals see their strategic goals as being linked to making major improvements to modernize and provide an increasingly broad array of services."
The survey responses suggest that much activity focused on building primary and outpatient care capacity, both on and off the main hospital campus. Nine of the ten respondents who reported on construction activity reported work on some form of outpatient facility. According to Maurice LaBonne, Senior Vice President of Facilities and Real Estate at NewYork-Presbyterian, "A major focus of our capital program is developing more robust primary and preventive health services in communities all around the City. So you will continue to see projects to develop smaller facilities throughout the five boroughs in addition to the large investments being made on our central campus."
The NYC Health + Hospitals system is currently building in all service areas. Roslyn Weinstein, Vice President in charge of capital construction, emphasized the system's diverse investments in primary care, "NYC Health + Hospitals is making a system-wide push to expand access to primary care services. We are making improvements to City facilities — not just in hospital settings — to be able to serve New York City residents who have not accessed primary care in the past."
At the same time, construction on inpatient facilities was reported by eight of the ten institutions who provided information on their activity. Much of this work falls into two categories: improvement of beds and surgical suites on the main campus and improvement of existing spaces at affiliate institutions in other parts of the City, another notable development discussed in more detail later in this report.
