Henry Ford breaks ground on $2.2 billion hospital expansion project
Detroit — Henry Ford Health officially broke ground Thursday on its $2.2 billion expansion in the city’s New Center area, a project that will include a new hospital with an emergency department, operating rooms, intensive care units, a rehabilitation clinic, and a 20-story patient tower.
Hospital officials and state and local leaders celebrated the occasion at a groundbreaking ceremony at the future hospital site on West Grand Boulevard west of M-10, directly across the street from Henry Ford’s main campus. The project is expected to take five years to complete and the new hospital will see its first patients by the end of 2029, Henry Ford Health said.
“We are so excited to give our team members a world-class space that matches their world class talent,” Henry Ford CEO Bob Riney said. “We are setting the stage for Detroit to become the national academic medical headquarters.”
Just across the M-10 Freeway, other parts of the expansion project are already underway. Construction of the $300 million Henry Ford Michigan State Health Sciences Research Center began in June. The facility will house the Nick Gilbert Neurofibromatosis Research Institute, named for Dan and Jennifer Gilbert’s late son who passed away from complications related to the condition in 2023.
“This will attract bright minds and talented professionals to our city, it will also create a strong pipeline to careers in health care and medical research for our local universities, giving more of our young people a reason to stay home,” Dan Gilbert said at Thursday’s ceremony.
Henry Ford also has announced plans to create a commercial corridor with affordable, mixed-use residential and commercial developments in New Center in partnership with Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores.
The entire project, including work with partners such as MSU and the Detroit Pistons, is expected to cost at least $3.3 billion. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said it would be a “rebirth” of the entire area.
Duggan and City Council President Mary Sheffield were both present at the celebration and lauded the public-private partnership as a signal of growth for the city.
“For most of my life, the hospital systems have bailed on Detroit with their investments in the suburbs,” Duggan said. “Today we are seeing one of the finest hospitals anywhere in America being built here in the city of Detroit.”
Henry Ford’s existing hospitals will continue to operate and eventually connect to the new facility through a series of bridges.
Hospital specs
Thursday’s groundbreaking comes nearly a year and a half after Henry Ford Health officials announced the massive expansion project.
Denise Brooks-Williams, executive vice president and CEO of Henry Ford Health’s Care Delivery System Operations, said health system officials met with stakeholders throughout the community including neighbors, local congregation members, business owners, and students over the past several months and years.
The new 75,000-square-foot emergency department, which will be double the size of the current emergency room, will feature a fast-track service area to address urgent care-type issues. This idea came from conversations with neighbors, Brooks-Williams said. It will also contain 100 private treatment spaces.
“When we were speaking with the community, one of their goals was to figure out how they could get emergency care, but have it at an urgent care pace,” Brooks-Williams said. “They’ll be able to get faster care than what you sometimes experience in the emergency department.”
The 20-story patient tower will also contain 432 individual patient rooms with space for visitors and new technology features including voice activation, touchscreens, and 75-inch smart televisions, the news release said.
The facility will also include 28 operating rooms capable of handling nearly every kind of complex surgical case, and five floors will be dedicated to specialized intensive care unit rooms ranging from cardiovascular to neurological, according to Henry Ford Health officials.
“We expect as the community is changing, you are going to see more and more complex conditions that will need more complex care,” said Chief Clinical Officer and President of Henry Ford’s Care Delivery System Adnan Munkarah. “This is why we are equipping and building this hospital to kind of meet the… future needs of our community.”
What else does the expansion include?
The entire project will expand Henry Ford’s footprint by 16 acres. This includes a new shared services building and central energy hub.
The 185,000-square-foot shared services building will host a new hospital kitchen, loading dock, and sterile processing area, and will open in 2028, the news release said.
The 46,000-square-foot central energy hub will house a water pump system used to heat and cool the hospital facilities. It is expected to be operational in 2027.
The environment and pollution were the main concerns community members had about the expansion, Riney said.
“This hub will allow us to heat and cool our facilities using water pumps. This will eliminate the need for natural gas, a significant contributor to pollution, asthma and many many illnesses,” Munkarah said.
Henry Ford is also constructing a 1,500-space parking deck which will open in 2025. They plan to gradually build up staffing for the current and new facilities over the next five years, Munkarah said.
“Through our partners at Wayne State University, Michigan State University, other colleges, as we also are training physicians we are going to be able to build that workforce that will be able to staff our current and new tower,” Munkarah said.
New rehab center
The three top floors of the new patient tower will be dedicated to intensive inpatient physical medicine and rehabilitation, provided in partnership with Chicago-based Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Gilbert, who suffered a stroke in 2019, said that their services were crucial in his early recovery but having to travel to Chicago was a burden.
“It was time to convince Shirley Ryan to build our next facility right here in downtown Detroit,” Gilbert said.
The Gilbert Family Foundation contributed $130 million to the project and also created a fund to make rehabilitation care at the new facility accessible, foundation co-founder Jennifer Gilbert announced Thursday.
“Even a local hospital can be inaccessible without the right financial support,” Jennifer Gilbert said. “That is why we are also creating a $10 million fund to fill in the critical… gap where insurance often ends but the need for care remains.”
Before the new hospital opens in 2029, Shirley Ryan will also help revamp some of Henry Ford’s existing rehabilitation sites, Henry Ford Health Executive Vice President Steven Kalkanis said.
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