Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville is on its way to becoming the third-largest hospital in the state based on bed capacity.
The hospital broke ground on a new multi-story medical tower on Tuesday. The 927,000 square-foot facility will be located next to the existing North Patient Tower on the NGMC Gainesville campus.
The new tower will accommodate more than 150 new inpatient beds and additional operating rooms. It will also house an expanded emergency department and will bring the Georgia Heart Institute’s heart and vascular services under one roof. In addition, there will be a new helipad, parking deck, and additional greenspaces where people may gather outdoors.
“The project team spent a lot of time talking to physicians, nurses and other clinical staff to design a place that would streamline care for our patients,” said NGHS Chief of Medical Staff Dr. Deepak Aggarwal. “The additional beds will help meet the demand of our growing population, and having more operating and procedure rooms to serve their needs is vital as well.”
The Emergency Department in Gainesville is consistently one of the top five busiest in the state of Georgia. Moving it to the reimagined space in the new tower should lead to shorter wait times for patients and an improved working environment for physicians and staff, hospital administrators say. It will also include space dedicated to treating pediatric patients.
“We have needed new space for a while, and I’m grateful that we are one step closer to that reality,” said NGHS Chief of Emergency Medician Dr. Mohak Dave՛. “We have been able to design the space around new workflows borne out of the pandemic and other experiences to make an emergency visit more efficient for patients, physicians and staff.”
“As you can imagine, COVID drastically changed the way we think about delivering care to our patients and has allowed us to apply lessons we have learned to the new tower design,” said NGHS President and CEO Carol Burrell.
One example of this can be found in the new tower’s proposed ventilation system. The patient rooms in the new tower will be designed so they can more easily be converted to negative pressure rooms to help prevent the spread of airborne viruses.
As Gainesville-Hall County’s top employer, NGHS says it’s committed to using local labor from the region and state as much as possible to build the new tower – with as many as 2,000 workers expected on-site at any given time.
“Over the next two years, it will be virtually impossible to miss this tower coming out of the ground,” said NGHS Board Chair Spence Price. “This campus is going to be transformed, and the economic and health impacts will be significant for our region.”
NGMC Gainesville is Northeast Georgia Health System’s largest hospital. The health system owns and operates three other hospitals in Braselton, Dahlonega, and Winder.
