<< Previous   of   Next >> (click to enlarge) Architect’s rendering courtesy of Providence Everett Medical Center By mid-2011, this 12-story, $500 million medical tower will be ready for patients at Providence Everett Medical Center in north Everett, marking the largest hospital expenditure since the Sisters of Providence bought the original Monte Cristo Hotel on the waterfront for the city’s first hospital in 1905.

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CONTACT SCBJ John Wolcott, Editor jwolcott@scbj.com Dave Clark, Assistant Editor dclark@scbj.com

$500 million Providence Everett medical tower construction begins this fall, opens in mid-2011

By John Wolcott
SCBJ Editor

When Snohomish County’s population, now around 650,000 people, reaches one million 20 to 30 years from now, Providence Everett Medical Center administrators expect to be ready for it.

“Right now, we’re already growing at a faster pace than we planned originally,” said PEMC CEO Dave Brooks, “so we were able to consolidate our long-range plans and shorten the time to get the new tower in place. Fortunately, Providence Health Services in Seattle showed their confidence in us and their commitment to the Everett community by coming up with access to the funding we needed. We are more than just a community hospital now, we’re a major referral hospital and a support center for physicians.”

In September, the hospital plans to break ground for construction of a $500 million, 368-bed medical tower, the new focal point for the Colby Street campus in north Everett, where original buildings date back to the 1920s.

The 12-story, 680,000-square-foot tower, due to open in mid-2011, is designed around state-of-the-art patient and family-centered medical care and comfort, privacy and convenience. It also will be filled with the latest diagnostic and treatment equipment and a highly trained staff of physicians, nurses and support staff.

“It’s so essential that we prepare to support the growing emergency room needs and prepare not only for the population growth that’s coming but also for the aging of the county’s population 10, 15 and 20 years out,” Brooks said. “We already know that those over 65 use three times as many health services as those under that age. During a five-year window we will be spending $700 million for the parking garage, the tower and renovation of the existing facilities, including critical technological equipment that often costs $2 to $3 million for each piece. It’s quite an honor for us to make that kind of health care investment to serve that many patients.”

When PEMC’s new $30 million, 1,000-car parking garage opens early in September, the present 500-car garage will be razed to make way for construction of the new medical tower and its skybridge connection to the hospital’s recently opened $62 million regional cancer center. That facility already has attracted new medical specialists and the latest available high-technology equipment for cancer treatments.

The entire first floor of the new tower will house a modernized emergency center with 79 private treatment rooms rooms and surgical centers to meet the growing demands of a growing county. In 2007, PEMC had a record-breaking 103,000 patient visits, making its ER facility one of the busiest in the state. The new facility will have an area for less acute care and four trauma rooms, plus CT and digitized diagnostic radiology services within the department.

Elsewhere in the tower will be a diagnostic imaging floor with six suites containing CT, MRI, radiography, diagnostic ultrasound, vascular ultrasound, nuclear medicine and a variety of non-surgical cardiology services.

There will be two floors dedicated to surgical suites, with 700-square-foot operating rooms, much larger than today’s 400-square-foot rooms. Two floors of the tower will be set aside for intensive care patients, including an intensive care unit, a cardiac surgery single-stay unit and six kidney dialysis stations.

Each of the top three floors will have 56 patient rooms for medical or post-surgical patients, all of them equipped with patient monitors and telemetry links to nurses stations.

“Over time, we’ll need more buildings and we’ll tear down the 1920’s building where we have offices and some testing space,” Brooks said. “It’s no longer cost efficient to maintain and operate it.”