VALHALLA — A bedside screen that allows patients to order food and video chat with family, adjustable ambient lighting to promote sleep and AI-powered monitors that track vital signs are among the planned features at Westchester Medical Center’s new critical care tower.
Expected to open in March 2027, the Brenda Fareri Pavilion is a five-story, 128-bed building that offers a glimpse into the future of intensive care at one of New York’s busiest hospitals and signals a new phase in expanding access to health care services.
The $260 million project will be funded through bonds, grants and donations.
It comes as Westchester Medical Center is seeing rising patient volume while the health system consolidates health care services across the region.
Dr. David Lubarsky, president and CEO of the Westchester Medical Center Health Network, said the goal is for the new tower to serve as a hub that elevates critical care and supports services at other network hospitals.
“We’re working on keeping as much care as close to home as possible,” Lubarsky said. “Patients come to the hub only for procedures that require highly specialized expertise or advanced technology, then return to their communities for recovery.”
New WMC hospital tower to elevate critical care and patient satisfaction
As the only Level 1 trauma center in the Hudson Valley, Westchester Medical Center has served patients for more than a century. Each year, about 400,000 patients — mostly from New York, but also from outside the state and abroad — come for care at its trauma center and its burn, pediatric, transplant and cancer care programs.
Patient volume has increased since the pandemic and trauma volume alone has grown by 10% over the past three years. The new tower is intended in part to help meet that rising demand for quality care.
The tower includes 128 private ICU rooms, a conference room and a meeting room on each floor. The new patient rooms will be nearly twice the size of the current 150-square-foot ICU rooms and each will have a window that brings in natural light. All rooms will be used for both critical care and general surgical patients, including those receiving trauma, cardiac, neuroscience and surgical care.
The shift to private patient rooms is aimed not only at preventing infection, but also at treating patients with dignity.
A central monitoring system will track patients’ vital signs, ultra-wave lighting is designed to help regulate circadian rhythms, bedside iPads will allow patients to order food and video chat with family and scanning and exam equipment will be located nearby.
“Part of getting well is having hope and feeling well-treated. The confidence families have in the care their loved ones are receiving comes from seeing them in the right environment,” Lubarsky said.
Hub for community hospitals to access support
The new patient tower will also strengthen the Valhalla campus as a hub where other network hospitals can access support and resources.
Westchester Medical Center’s parent organization, WMCHealth, has been expanding rapidly through consolidation. It recently integrated two healthcare systems — HealthAlliance and Bon Secours — and now operates nine hospitals in Valhalla, Warwick, Margaretville, Port Jervis, Suffern, Poughkeepsie and Kingston.
Lubarsky said his vision is to run the facilities as an integrated network with shared policies, protocols and oversight, allowing hospitals to share resources ranging from physicians to a unified medical record system.
Patients, for example, can receive telehealth services from doctors based on the main campus. Physicians at other hospitals can call the headquarters for support and, if needed, arrange for specialists from the main campus to travel to other facilities.
“We are trying to make care more patient-friendly here at the hub while also investing in the other facilities that serve many diverse communities, so they can offer more subspecialized care and high-level technology and ensure the same level of care,” Lubarsky said.
How will the Medicaid funding cut affect care at Westchester Medical Center
Like many safety-net hospitals, Westchester Medical Center is also facing financial uncertainty that stemmed from the pandemic and has been compounded by federal cuts to Medicaid funding.
The WMCHealth Network serves one-third of Medicaid patients in the Hudson Valley. And about 25% of all New York hospitals could face closure, layoffs or reduced services due to Medicaid cuts approved by Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration last year, according to a recent report by the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen.
Lubarsky said, as a result, hospitals are likely to lose patients who need care for chronic conditions until they become sicker and show up at the hospital in worse shape, making treatment more difficult.
He said the system is working with county officials and community benefit organizations to help people stay enrolled. The biggest barrier to maintaining Medicaid coverage, he said, is often a failure to complete paperwork rather than a lack of eligibility. He added that the network expects limited impact because most people affected by the rollback are concentrated in New York City.
Helu Wang covers economic growth, real estate and education for The Journal News/lohud and USA Today Network. Reach her at hwang@gannett.com and follow her @helu.wangny on Instagram.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: See Westchester Medical Center’s latest plans for $260M patient tower
Reporting by Helu Wang, Rockland/Westchester Journal News / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
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