This month Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle and the Cook County Health & Hospitals System released the proposal for construction of the Central Campus Health Center, a new state-of-the-art outpatient facility that will adjoin John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.
The new facility will help the Cook County Health & Hospitals System improve the delivery of care for its patients and consolidate many functions now housed in three buildings that have passed their useful lives.
Highlights of the new Central Campus Health Center include:
- A new nine-story 282,000-square-foot building that will consolidate many of the services in the Fantus Health Center (built in 1959), the current administration building on Polk Street (which was built in 1931) and the Hektoen Administration Building (built in 1964). Altogether, these old buildings comprise about 680,000 square feet of real estate.
- The Central Campus Health Center will allow CCHHS to improve and expand outpatient services, reduce operating costs, improve patients’ experience and increase clinical and administrative efficiency. CCHHS sees more than 100,000 unique patients through over 550,000 clinic visits annually on the central campus, demonstrating the need for more clinically efficient and upgraded Central Campus Health Center.
- The new building will also allow the County to avoid costly capital renewals for the outdated and inefficient buildings. Deferred maintenance on the old buildings, according to a U.S. Equities study from 2013, was estimated to be $125 million ($128 million in inflation-adjusted costs today), greater than the amount to be spent on the new building.
- Much-needed surface parking for the CCHHS campus will be added on the current Fantus site once the clinics are moved into the new facility and Fantus is demolished. Last October the board approved a development team for the project headed by Clayco, which has been at work on Phase One programming and schematic design for the construction project. The board’s action followed an extensive RFP process that began in November 2014.
Source: http://www.cookcountyhhs.org.
