The new 22-story glass-encased tower at Houston Methodist Hospital was meant to send a message.
The nearly 1-million-square-foot Paula and Joseph C. “Rusty” Walter III Tower set to open later this month features 366 beds and 18 operating rooms, including four hybrid ORs that combine advanced medical imaging devices such as intraoperative MRI to allow surgeons to more quickly adjust their surgical plans.
It will have 14 heart catheterization labs, three intensive care floors with all-private rooms, six acute care floors and a VIP suite.
This new tower at Houston Methodist is the cap to a healthcare investment blitz across the Houston region—a clear defense of its reputation for delivering the most advanced care available in one of the most competitive healthcare markets in the country.
"Our goal is to be in all the Houston area markets and be able to offer an absolutely unparalleled quality of services," said Sid Sanders, Houston Methodist senior vice president of construction, facilities, design and real estate.
In 2014, two leading healthcare competitors in Houston made major announcements about expansions in care. "That was really the catalyst," Sanders said. "We’d been sitting on the fence about whether to move forward with those plans. We knew it was inevitable that we’d have to build a replacement. It was just a matter of the best timing."
Growth mode
Measured by beds—it has an estimated 2,765 beds—Houston Methodist is the city's third largest healthcare system behind HCA Gulf Coast Division and Memorial Hermann Health System, and followed by CHI St. Luke's Health. For years, Houston Methodist knew it needed to replace its aging inpatient facility to keep its market share in Houston's competitive healthcare market.
Like many hospitals around the U.S., Houston Methodist Hospital was built more than 60 years ago. Despite a smorgasbord of renovations and expansions over the years, it was getting difficult for the infrastructure to evolve with technology and expectations for patient care, Sanders said.
The population and its needs were fast growing. Houston has the second fastest growing population right behind the Dallas region, with its metropolitan statistical area reaching 6.9 million at the U.S. Census Bureau's latest count. It is the fourth largest U.S. city and one of the top five most populous metropolitan regions in the country.
But in 2010, the hospital needed to press pause. In the throes of the great recession and amid the passage of the Affordable Care Act, there was great uncertainty.
After a few years, as the Houston Business Journal reported, Houston Methodist sought to acquire what was then St. Luke's Episcopal Health System. But Denver-based Catholic Health Initiatives ultimately won out and bought the health system for $2 billion in 2013.
Houston Methodist officials decided to pivot, they reported, rebranding from The Methodist Hospital System to its current name and acquiring Favrot Hall, a former graduate and postgraduate facility in the Texas Medical Center. In 2014, they began construction of Walter Tower.
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Building connections
The tower itself ties into five different buildings of the medical campus on seven different levels.
It has a helipad that gives emergency personnel direct access to the OR, cath lab and intensive care units. It has six emergency generators sitting on the roof that have the capability to supply emergency electricity for most of the medical campus and massive flood doors to protect against the likes of weather like Hurricane Harvey.
And finally, it has the Barbara and President George H.W. Bush Atrium—"the living room of the campus," Sanders calls it—which features an iconic and recently restored 1963 “Extending Arms of Christ” mosaic which was relocated from the Fannin Street entrance.
All these design elements, Sanders said, were to ensure a strong and seamless connection between the tower and the medical center—and ultimately the community.
"You've got to be competitive in terms of the quality patient experience and the quality of the procedure platforms, particularly when the kind of specialties we do at our academic medical center are the highest, most acute, highest patient care you can find in Houston," Sanders said. "So it's incumbent on us to have the best tools to deliver that service."