Inpatient projects: Plans unveiled for $360M N.D. hospital

 371-BED FACILITY WOULD REPLACE OLDER CAMPUS AND BE BUILT OUT OF FLOOD PLAIN

By Dan Emerson

While much of the country is struggling to dig out of the recession, the state of North Dakota has been enjoying an economic boom, fueled in large part by new oil-field discoveries.

At the same, the state’s largest city, Fargo, which shares a metropolitan area with Moorhead, Minn., continues to grow. The city’s population stood at about 105,000 in 2010, and when paired with its Minnesota counterpart, the Fargo-Moorhead metro has grown to about 208,000 residents in 2010. The area’s population stood at about 174,000 residents a decade earlier.

With the increase in population has come increased demand for healthcare services, and Sanford Health, with bases in Fargo and Sioux Falls, S.D., has decided to increase the supply with the largest project of its kind in North Dakota history.

The health system recently announced plans for the new Sanford Fargo Medical Center, a $360 million facility that will have 371 private rooms. It will anchor a 100-acre campus in rapidly-growing southwest Fargo, with room for future expansion.

A ground breaking planned for 2013 with completion scheduled for three years later.

The 704,000 square foot, 11-story facility would house Sanford’s medical and surgical services, emergency medicine, and four out of five of Sanford’s Centers of Excellence — heart, children’s, women’s, and orthopedics/sports medicine.

According to officials, the facility will have 30 operating rooms, 10 heart catheterization/interventional labs, 40 emergency treatment/trauma rooms, 300 clinic exam rooms, and space for 200 physicians and 2,700 employees, according to Kelby Krabbenhoft, Sanford Health president and CEO.

The new medical center is planned as a replacement Sanford’s existing downtown campus, where a lack of expansion space, outdated buildings and traffic congestion have limited growth. The old campus’s proximity to the Red River also makes it susceptible to floods.

Minneapolis-based AECON-Ellerbe Becket will design the new medical center. As of recent weeks, the construction contractor had not been named, according to Sanford spokesman Darren Huber.

As part of an overall capital project, Sanford also plans to upgrade the downtown campus with a $30 million expansion of the Roger Maris Cancer Center – Sanford’s fifth center of excellence. The cancer center would eventually encompass 200,000 square feet and have 220 private rooms.

Some of the older buildings on the downtown campus would be razed and replaced by green space, replicating the look of a college campus, Mr. Huber says.

Once the projects are complete, about 40 percent of Sanford’s Fargo space would be located at the downtown campus, including rehabilitation services, behavioral health and eating disorder treatment program. About 58 percent of Sanford’s Fargo patients currently travel from outside of the metro area, according to officials. They estimate that by 2015, Sanford will need 7,178 employees to serve the area.

To finance the expansion, the Sanford Health Foundation has started a campaign to raise $50 million in endowment funding.

Sanford Health is the largest rural, not-for-profit health system in the United States, serving 112 communities in seven states.