In a major step toward a long-stated goal of “making health care more affordable and keeping it close to home,” Highmark Health President and CEO David Holmberg on Wednesday announced plans to build a new 160-bed hospital in Pine Township as well as four small-scale “neighborhood hospitals.”

Together with planned expansion and facility renovations at Forbes, Allegheny General, Jefferson and West Penn hospitals, the Pittsburgh health care giant has set its sights on $700 million in new facility construction, expansion and renovation in the next four to five years.

The announcement came Wednesday in a press briefing at Highmark’s Fifth Avenue Place headquarters, Downtown.

“Our intention was to push care out to the community,” said Cynthia Hundorfean, president and CEO of Highmark Health’s Allegheny Health Network care provider system, whose network of hospitals will grow to 13 once the five facilities are completed.

Kris B. Mamula

New AHN hospital would add capacity to a region already awash in empty beds

Combined with earlier announced plans for $315 million in capital investments for AHN’s cancer network and the Erie market, Highmark Health and AHN officials say they are committed to investing more than $1 billion in the system’s provider network, while creating more than 800 new health care jobs in the region and “hundreds” of trade union jobs for the construction and renovation work.

The Pine hospital will be built in front of AHN’s Wexford Health + Wellness Pavilion on Perry Highway. Ground breaking for the new hospital, which will require regulatory approval, is expected in mid-2018 with completion by 2021.

Locations for the four neighborhood hospitals — each of which will include an emergency department and 10-12 patient beds for short-stay use — have not been determined although Mr. Holmberg said the system is scouting the Aspinwall/Fox Chapel area for one of them.

“We want to make sure these sites are exactly where they need to be.”

Officials sounded particularly excited about the neighborhood hospital initiative, which the health system is undertaking as part of a joint venture with Texas-based Emerus.

Emerus specializes in managing micro-hospitals, primarily in the south and western regions of the U.S. The four local hospitals also will be under Emerus management and are expected to open in early 2019.

Unlike urgent care centers, these 15,000- to 60,000-square-foot facilities are fully-licensed and are open 24 hours a day, with primary and specialty care services and computerized tomography, or CT, scanner imaging.

Steve Twedt

With two years to go, Highmark and UPMC disagree on how their nasty divorce will end

In a region long believed to have too many hospital beds, the addition of dozens more in five different facilities may seem counter intuitive. But Mr. Holmberg said the idea is to treat patients close to home while still having beds available at the larger hospitals for those needing more critical care.

“We want to make sure we have people in the right beds,” he said, adding that AHN may convert some semi-private rooms to private rooms as well.

It is likely no coincidence that the four small-scale hospitals are scheduled to open in 2019, the same year Highmark and UPMC will end their long-standing relationship that gave Highmark members in-network access to UPMC physicians and hospitals.

After that, the two become wholly independent integrated health care delivery systems, with competing health plans and provider networks.

In addition to the new construction, Highmark and AHN officials on Wednesday laid out plans for existing facilities, including an expansion and renovation of the emergency department at Jefferson Hospital in Jefferson Hills; expanded and renovated surgical recovery units at Forbes Hospital in Monroeville; an expanded neonatal intensive care unit at West Penn Hospital in Bloomfield; and continued investment in infrastructure, technology and the cancer program at Allegheny General Hospital on North Side.

They are building “what we believe is the future of health care, not the past,” Mr. Holmberg said. “We promised Western Pennsylvania that we could become a better health system that would be different and that’s exactly what we did.”

Steve Twedt: stwedt@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1963.

First Published: October 18, 2017, 2:31 p.m.
Updated: October 18, 2017, 9:14 p.m.