UPMC Mercy hospital’s $510M expansion on track for spring 2023 opening

Hot orange sparks rained down on freshly erected steel beams Tuesday morning as construction workers welded and hammered while harnessed to high-rise scaffolds and aerial lifts overlooking the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh.

Two giant cranes rotated nonstop, hoisting building materials weighing thousands of pounds across the busy construction site of the 410,000-square-foot expansion to UPMC Mercy hospital in Uptown.

More than 400 workers were at work on the UPMC Mercy Pavilion — a $510 million, nine-story tower that will vastly expand the hospital’s capacity for outpatient vision and rehabilitation care.

“We’re just very excited,” said John Innocenti, president of UPMC Mercy hospital. “The impact is bringing specialized care in one central location to the population, really bringing the service line of ophthalmology and rehabilitation into one core area.”

Construction on the tower began in March 2019 and is scheduled for completion by the end of next year. The goal is to open the tower to its first patients by May 2023, project manager Michael Chiappetta said.

The Locust Street facility near Duquesne University will feature 81 eye exam rooms, 10 rehabilitation exam rooms, ophthalmology operating rooms and 87,000 square feet of research space. It will treat patients with visual, mobility and cognitive impairments, and its specialty areas will include cardiac, cornea, glaucoma and neurological care as well as plastic surgery.

Among highlights of the new medical tower:

• A full-sized, life-skills apartment — complete with residential furniture and appliances — where “patients can learn to navigate that next step” as they transition to living independently with their vision or mobility issues, Chiappetta said.

• An outdoor healing garden on the fifth floor includes a variety of surfaces — gravel, stone, wood, steps and ramps — to help patients practice getting around and doing physical rehabilitation in a safe environment.

• A patient gym with floor-to-ceiling glass windows providing views across the river of Pittsburgh’s Mt. Washington and South Side Slopes.

“It’s going to have a full glass wall at the back, so that those using the gym get to take advantage of the views on the Mon (River),” Chiappetta said.

Designed by by HOK/IKM Architects, the tower’s floor plans aim to streamline services for patients. A central pod on the surgical center floor will make it easier for patients to go from an exam to get a lab result or pick up a prescription at the in-house pharmacy. Previously, patients would have to traverse several floors of UPMC Mercy’s main building to go between doctor’s appointments and lab work.

“It streamlines the whole process to reduce wait times,” Chiappetta said.

A six-story parking garage — with two more floors below ground level — will provide patients and employees another 1,100 parking spaces, and a pedestrian bridge will link the new building to the main hospital along Locust Street.

The covid-19 pandemic and related lockdown in mid-2020 did not thwart the construction of hospitals, with the state granting exemptions for health care-related facilities in the works as other non-exempt projects had to temporarily shut down.

The ongoing global supply shortage has posed some challenges, Innocenti said, but has not significantly hampered progress. For example, he cited a creative solution to not being able to find enough plywood needed to lay concrete: the general contractor, Mascaro Construction, came up with a way to wash and reuse old plywood.

The UPMC Mercy Pavilion’s Vision Institute will be headed by a world-renowned ophthalmologist, Dr. José-Alain Sahel, who previously led the Vision Institute in Paris. Surgical and clinical facilities will be on the first several floors, with space reserved for clinical and academic research on the highest levels.

Longtime clinician scientist Dr. Gwendolyn Sowa, chair of physical medicine and rehabilitation and president of the Association of Academic Physiatrists, will serve as director of the Pavilion’s UPMC Rehabilitation Institute.

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The project marks the first of three major hospital expansions in the works as part of a $2 billion investment into specialty care in Pittsburgh first announced in 2017.

Work has yet to begin on the second two specialty hospital projects in Oakland and Shadyside, which won’t be completed for several years.

Innocenti will continue to serve on the steering committee for the 18-story inpatient tower expansion at the UPMC Presbyterian hospital campus in Oakland. The Presbyterian project will add 636 beds and 900,000 square feet for heart and transplant programs and a lobby-level “lifestyle village.”

“Everything is moving forward,” Innocenti said. “UPMC is cutting edge and coming up with innovations in outpatient and inpatient (and) definitely creating opportunities, creating industry in the city of Pittsburgh and creating better patient care.”

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