3 days Ago By Brielle Bredsten
DULUTH — As the second phase of Aspirus St. Luke’s Health Forward Initiative comes to a close, the project will soon enter its third and final phase. Dr.
Nick Van Deelen, president of Aspirus Minnesota Region, provided an update on the second phase of the campus redevelopment and expansion project during the Downtown Duluth organization’s luncheon Thursday at The Garden in Canal Park. “I've been so fortunate to spend my professional career in this community, and most of that has been taking care of patients in the emergency department, and that is just a great opportunity to get to know your neighbors and to really understand the joys and the challenges that surround us,” said Van Deelen, who preceded Eric Lohn as president of the health system in March. Van Deelen previously served as St.
Luke’s chief medical officer. ADVERTISEMENT Earlier this year, St. Luke's completed its merger with the Wausau-based Aspirus Health.
During the affiliation process, the health system also began work on the second phase of its Health Forward Initiative. “We, as Aspirus, will be investing $300 million over eight years,” Van Deelen said. “That's capital investment.
That's aside from all of the operational money that will be flooded into our system or our region.” An $81 million investment, Phase 2 included the addition of three stories to Building A. This expanded its critical care space with 28 intensive care unit beds and 33 coronary intensive care beds, as well as over 60 new, private rooms.
“It also includes a lot of safety measures that we didn't have in our other areas,” Van Deelen said, “like in the ICU, there are lifts everywhere to help protect our staff from getting injured. We know staff injury from helping moving patients who are really struggling with mobility is significant.” The replacement and expansion of the city’s new parking ramp was included in the second portion of the project, providing 330 spaces for vehicles and free parking for patients.
“And the third part of Phase 2 is we are going back in the current hospital and refurbishing all of the spaces,” said Van Deelen, noting that the remodel is about 70% complete. ADVERTISEMENT The project began with the construction of Building A and specialty clinics, a surgery expansion, and the relocation and expansion of the emergency department and cardiac cath labs. Relocation of the ambulance garage and helistop was part of Phase 1, an overall investment of $87.
5 million. Entering Phase 3, the health system will invest $150 million into outpatient services, a main campus lobby, centralized registration for on-campus services, and a new skywalk to connect parking to the east side of its campus. “Phase 3 at this point, think of more as conceptual,” Van Deelen said.
“We think that's maybe in the three to five years out range, and that really depends on utilization patterns and technology.” Aspirus St. Luke’s will transition to the Madison-based Epic electronic health record system to improve patient experience, with implementation in April.
In the future, Aspirus St. Luke’s hopes to strengthen its partnership with the University of Minnesota Duluth during the college’s transitions of its medical school over the next two years. “They've started a new curriculum,” Van Deelen said.
“It starts in two years. Students will stay in Duluth at St. Luke's and Essentia for their entire training program, which is great for all of us, because then we don't lose them to the cities.
” The change comes with an opportunity to expand the medical campus. Currently, the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth and the College of Pharmacy are located on its campus. ADVERTISEMENT “UMD has space that they need to repurpose for other programs that are expanding, and really the idea is to move at least a portion of those two schools into the Medical District to serve as an anchor and grow adjacent businesses,” Van Deelen said.
Aspirus St. Luke’s has proposed a location for the medical school at the corner of Eighth Avenue East and First Street, positioned in the downtown medical district between its facility and that of Essentia Health, which Van Deelen said would offer a shared-resource model between the two competing health systems. “We're participating in the community advisory board that the university's put together, along with our colleagues at Essentia,” Van Deelen said.
“We're confident that we'll get to something good for the region and for our students.”.
