Stanford Medical Center is undergoing extensive reconstruction to meet seismic requirements, incorporate more advanced medical technology and accommodate growing capacity needs.

The renewal project was approved in 2011 after four years of negotiation to obtain entitlements from the City of Palo Alto. Its costs amount to approximately $5 billion, with each entity funding its own projects under the umbrella of the Renewal Project, as Stanford University Medical Center spokesperson Jen Costa explained.

The first stage of the process — the Welch Road Utility Project — involved setting up information technology infrastructure and replacing important utilities to service medical facilities that would later be constructed. This phase was completed four months early, and Welch Road returned to being a two-way road on July 22.

Changes at the Hoover Medical Campus entail building a new neuroscience center and a nine-level parking structure, as well as modernizing the Hoover Pavilion, which will house the Stanford Health Library. The revamped facilities will allow for more outpatient services, advanced neurological research and specialized healthcare.

The Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital is expanding its facilities to accommodate growing numbers of patients and provide more advanced and specialized pediatric care. Its 521,000-square-foot expansion will create space for 150 new patient rooms and additional rooms for diagnosis, surgery and treatment.

Stanford Hospital, originally built in 1959, is rebuilding to meet growing capacity needs and seismic safety requirements. The new hospital will be 824,000 square feet, with 368 individual patient rooms. A larger emergency department and Level 1 trauma center will more readily address urgent and critical emergencies locally.

Both hospitals have stayed open and fully operative during the constructions of the new buildings.

The School of Medicine is also undergoing reconstruction to replace its Alway, Edwards, Lane and Grant buildings with three Foundations in Medicine (FIMs) buildings that are seismically safe and that can better accommodate modern medical technology.

All of the new buildings will be outfitted to support technology for modern medicine. The hospitals will integrate electronic health records, something that the structure of the decades-old buildings could not support.

“We’ve been working to see how we can harness technology to evolve our building operations even after the building has been designed, so it’s a way of taking a patient, focused approach to guide patients and families through the very complex process of healthcare,” said Vice President of Planning, Design and Construction Mark Tortorich.

According to the official project website, renovations at the children’s hospital will be finished in 2016. The rebuilding of Stanford Hospital will be completed in 2017, and the new hospital will open in 2018, at which time the old 1959 and 1973 parts of the hospital will be demolished.

Afterward, existing hospital facilities will experience some renovation to match with the new buildings. Potential changes include converting two-patient rooms into single-patient rooms and updating infrastructure, loading docks and equipment to create a more spacious and contemporary setting for operations and recovery.

The School of Medicine also anticipates additional changes in the future to continue modernizing and expanding.

“There is going to be a significant amount of change to how we have evolved so far, and we’re going to have to support the two new hospitals as they expand,” said Niraj Dangoria, associate dean of Facilities Planning and Management at the Stanford School of Medicine.

The renewal has certainly been a substantial undertaking that involved years of planning and dedicated teams endeavoring to transform old facilities into safe, advanced and modern buildings that will service the community.

“The projects are going very well,” Tortorich said. “They’re safe work sites, which is very important to us. They’ve got good management teams. The contractors are very good, the architects are doing their jobs…And we’ll all be delighted with all of the buildings that we’re able to deliver.”

Contact Andrea Tam at andreatam ‘dot’ 2497 ‘at’ gmail ‘dot’ com.