Corewell Health plans to expand the footprint of its Butterworth Hospital campus in Grand Rapids by constructing a new, 621,000-square-foot building that is to include a new emergency department, 180 private hospital rooms and 12 to 16 new operating rooms that will likely connect to the rest of the campus with bridges and tunnels.
“We did an assessment, and west Michigan is a growing community. We’re also an aging community,” said Dr. Josh Kooistra, president of Corewell Health in west Michigan, told the Free Press. “We know that the care needs of our community are going to require additional beds and also modernization of our facilities to accommodate the patient population but also new capabilities that are coming out in the field of medicine.
“We are investing in Grand Rapids’ future.”
The project is to be built on the property at 230 Michigan St. and 330 Barclay Ave. in Grand Rapids, where Corewell now has buildings that house medical clinics, physician offices and condominiums, and are used for administrative purposes, the health system announced Wednesday, Jan. 21.
“There now are plans to relocate those clinics elsewhere, either on the medical center campus or along the Medical Mile,” said Kevin Vos, senior vice president of facilities and support services for Corewell, which is Michigan’s largest health system with 21 hospitals and more than 60,000 employees.
The Corewell Health Board of Directors has approved seed funding, Vos said, to allow for what he called pre-construction work, which includes designing concepts for the space.
“We plan on going back to the board in early ’27 with construction documents and final design, which will inform the price,” he said.
Kooistra said it’s too soon in the process to give any cost estimates. Once construction plans are finalized, the project also would need approval from the city of Grand Rapids, and to add licensed hospital beds, it will also have to apply to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs.
If it is approved, the project would add 52 licensed beds to Butterworth, which currently has 703 licensed beds, and would eliminate all of the semi-private rooms in the medical center, Kooistra said.
“Our proposed new 12 to 16 operating rooms really will accommodate the square footage needed to do things like robotic surgery, which often requires much greater footprints than our existing operating rooms,” he said.
“In addition, our emergency department at Butterworth Hospital is seeing over 100,000 patients a year, and that facility is really designed with a footprint to see about two-thirds of that volume. And so when we are experiencing times like these, with our peak of influenza season, that … emergency department is often over capacity.”
This project is targeted for completion at the end of 2030.
Contact Kristen Shamus: kshamus@freepress.com. Subscribe to the Free Press.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Corewell to expand Butterworth Hospital campus in Grand Rapids
Reporting by Kristen Jordan Shamus, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
