Construction begins on vascular center
Published: August 03, 2009, 10:42 am
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Construction began today on the new vascular and research center on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, considered a key development for the city, hospitals and the University at Buffalo.
The 10-story, $291-million facility will abut Buffalo General Hospital at Ellicott and Goodrich streets. It represents a collaboration between Kaleida Health and UB.
Four floors will consolidate Kaleida Health's heart, stroke and vascular care services in one location temporarily being called the Global Vascular Institute, and will also include a new, expanded emergency room.
UB will use the top five floors for related medical research and a "bioscience incubator" to help encourage spin-off business startups.
Kaleida Health last week bought the last parcel of land for the building, paying $1.1 million to the city for a section of Goodrich Street. Today, the project, the most expensive in the city in years, received a ceremonial groundbreaking.
"We're full speed ahead," said Michael Hughes, spokesman for Kaleida Health.
The project will allow Kaleida Health to shift 1,000 physicians and staff, as well as thousands of patients, from its Millard Fillmore Hospital to Buffalo General and the new building after its scheduled completion in November 2011. Millard Fillmore at Gates Circle will then be closed and a reuse determined.
On a larger scale, the project is the first tangible result from the state-ordered consolidation of Kaleida Health and Erie County Medical Center. The two organizations remain separate for the time being, but are operating under a parent corporation, Great Lakes Health, that has significant influence over key decisions.
ECMC will participate in the new center and help finance it.
The building also represents a step in UB's plan to move its medical school and other health-related programs downtown. The idea, in partnership with Kaleida Health and ECMC, is to create an academically focused medical center at multiple locations, although the heart of it is proposed for the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.
The campus includes the blocks where Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the Hauptman-Woodward Institute are located.
"This is going to create energy and a hub of activity downtown," said James Kaskie, chief executive officer of Kaleida Health.
UB is using $118 million in public funds for its portion of the building.
Kaleida Health received $64.5 million from the state as part of the consolidation agreement with ECMC, as well as a $20 million loan from the medical center for the new building. Kaleida Health put together a consortium of backers, including banks and pension funds, to provide "bridge" financing with taxable bonds for the remainder of the project's cost.
Officials said that the recession froze them out of the usual source of hospital financing … tax-exempt bonds. After five to seven years, officials said, the hospital system will refinance the bridge loans in another way, depending on market conditions.
Doctors played key roles in planning the new building. They sought a design that would combine in one location the various specialists who deal with blood vessel diseases in different parts of the body.
Advances in medicine have blurred the lines between specialties that handle conditions in the body's vascular highway. Yet heart and vascular surgeons tend to work separately and, at times, competitively.
The thinking goes that the benefits of coming together — from sharing knowledge to being more cost-efficient — outweigh the turf battles that historically split the specialities.
"We've created a building that will force doctors to get out of their silos and collide with each other, and with scientists," said Dr. L. Nelson Hopkins III, chief of neurosurgery at Kaleida Health and chairman of neurosurgery at UB.
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