Four hospitals in the west Houston and Katy areas are expanding their campuses in an effort to make a trip to the hospital a little more accessible.
“Our hospital is frequently full, and the population in Katy continues to grow. I’m excited for our hospital to offer our same type [of] quality, to expand our services, be able to keep more patients and expand our capacities to population growth,” said John Kueven, chief operating officer of Memorial Hermann Katy Hospital.
Memorial Hermann
Memorial Hermann Katy Hospital will open a new patient tower the first week of January with additional projects opening from spring until the fall of 2016. The new tower will expand nearly all of the Katy hospital’s services on the first four floors, Kueven said.
“Katy is still the fastest-growing area in Houston,” Kueven said. “We’re projecting more than a 13 percent growth rate over the next five years in Katy, and we often are at capacity. Our ER is full and our hospital is full, so really in January [that] gives us a lot more capability to grow with our community over the next five years.” [polldaddy poll=9199132]
Looking ahead, he said hospital officials are exploring expansion in the new tower on floors five and six in the next five years. Plans for the fifth floor could include a general medicine and surgical floor, he said.
“Katy has grown so much and the hospital has grown, and a lot of people still have the mentality of needing to go down to the [Texas] Medical Center, but we can provide it at Memorial Hermann Katy,” he said.
Texas Children’s West
Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus is also planning for growth.
“We have a $50 million expansion underway right now, and it’s a three-year expansion,” Texas Children’s West Campus President Chanda Cashen Chacón said.
“We’ve just started the second year of that and really the goal is to build out almost all of our remaining shell space that we have on the campus right now. That’s really not because we want to build—it’s because the community needs us to build.”
The hospital is expanding its medical office building space to include ambulatory care and adding space in its inpatient building for beds along with expanding operating rooms and interventional radiology, she said.
In October and November, the hospital opened 18 acute care beds. Eight of those beds are in a special isolation unit, which is exclusive to the West campus, Cashen Chacón said.
By the end of the expansion, the hospital will be an 86-bed facility.
In addition to the building expansion, the hospital group owns additional land on its campus.
“The next step would be expanding building capacity on the campus,” she said. “We are trying to stay ahead of the growth curve of the pediatric population in this area, which is very challenging.”
Houston Methodist West
In January, Houston Methodist West Hospital will begin Phase 2 of its expansion project, which will include taking its patient bed count from 193 to 288 and adding more operating rooms, among other projects.
Houston Methodist West has been in the Katy area for only five years, but Vice President Peyton Elliott said there was a need to expand about two years sooner than anticipated.
“This campus has been master-planned for a 400-bed hospital campus with four medical office buildings,” Elliott said.
To this end, the construction beginning in January will not be the last project for the West campus.
Future phases of growth will include adding 100 more beds. The cost and timeline of the project has yet to be fully determined.
“This is a very young community, but it is projected to age and as the population ages, they need more medical care, so that’s another driver of need for increased hospital beds,” said Vicki Brownewell, vice president and chief nursing officer.
MD Anderson Cancer Center
Near Hwy. 6 in west Houston, MD Anderson Caner Center is expanding to provide medical services to those who may not want to travel to the TMC downtown, said Kent Postma, executive director of MD Anderson’s Houston-area locations.
Plans for an outpatient facility were approved in late August by the Texas board of regents and will be built east of Hwy. 6 and north of I-10.
“MD Anderson has patients who come from all over Texas, all over the U. S., all over the world, and with over 30 million people in the state of Texas, we know that not everybody can come into the Texas Medical Center. As we’ve gone out in the suburban markets of Houston, we’ve been able to attract patients [who] have told us otherwise they may or may not have chosen to come into the [TMC],” Postma said.
The cancer center already has a presence in Katy, including a radiation treatment center on the former Christus St. Catherine campus owned by Houston Methodist.
Postma said the outpatient campus is the focus of MD Anderson’s west Houston efforts for the next five-plus years.
“We hope to migrate the imaging services, the radiation, the medicine, the surgery [services] that are peppered throughout these different locations into a campus location right there at Hwy. 6 and I-10, and that will allow for ‘one-stop’ services.”
