Rush Oak Park Hospital has announced plans to build a $30 million emergency department building on its campus north of its main building at the corner of Maple Avenue and Madison Street.
The hospital said in a press release that the one-and-a-half-story, 55,000-square-foot building will take the place of the five-story Rush Oak Park Medical Arts Building, which once served as a nursing school dormitory. That building has been vacant for two years.
Twenty thousand square feet of the new the new building will be dedicated to the emergency department, and the remainder will be used for program and building support, according to Rush. The department will include 21 treatment bays, two isolation rooms, two behavioral health rooms and a room for treating sexual abuse patients.
“Technology changes and the types of patients we are seeing changes,” Rush Oak Park President and CEO Bruce Elegant said in a telephone interview.
He noted that the new emergency department will include an updated emergency preparedness facility equipped to handle patients with potentially infectious diseases.
“A couple of our exam rooms will have a back door into the ambulance bay, so the patient doesn’t have to be transported through the middle of the emergency room,” he said, adding that those rooms also will have “negative pressure” ventilation systems, so potentially contaminated air is not circulated through the rest of the emergency room.
Elegant said in the press release that the existing ER was built in 1969 and was designed to serve 15,000 patients a year.
“Since that time, the emergency facility has been remodeled and expanded several times, but we’ve come to the point where we have converted every available square foot in its current location,” he said. “We’re now seeing more than 37,000 patients per year and that number is projected to increase.”
Elegant added that the expansion plan, which will be contained to the hospital’s existing campus, will help address the growing demand for outpatient and emergency room service.
“Rush Oak Park Hospital has a deep commitment to the community going back 100 years, and we intend to adapt to continue to meet the health care needs of residents in the future,” Elegant said.
Elegant said in a telephone interview that emergency room visits at Rush Oak Park have increase an average of 7.4 percent over the last 10 years. He attributed the increase to Rush’s reputation for having short wait times and a low percentage of patients leaving without treatment.
He said the national average for patients leaving emergency rooms without being treated is about 3 percent, which is substantially higher than the 1 percent of patients leaving the Rush Oak Park Hospital ER without being treated.
Elegant also noted the four-star rating the hospital received this year from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for clinical quality and patient satisfaction.
Demolition of the existing structure could begin in spring of 2017 and construction of the new facility could be complete by late 2018 or early 2019, according to Robert Spadoni, Rush Oak Park Hospital’s vice president of operations.
The hospital said it has filed a certificate of need application with the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board for the project to replace the 50-year-old emergency room.
Spadoni said in the press release that hospital physicians and staff have contributed to the initial design of the facility, and Rush has had ongoing discussions with the village of Oak Park on the project.
The hospital will hold public meetings in the coming months with nearby residents to address any issues that arise during construction.
The existing emergency room near Madison Street and Wisconsin Avenue will continue operation until the new building is completed.
The forthcoming emergency room was revealed the same day Rush University Medical Center unveiled plans for a mobile stroke treatment unit – a state-of-the-art ambulance equipped to treat stroke victims onsite.
The mobile stroke treatment unit will be housed at Rush Oak Park and staffed by Rush University Medical Center personnel, Elegant said. The high-tech ambulance will serve patients within a five-mile radius of the hospital, he said.
 A Rush Oak Park news release notes that the ambulance will be equipped with telemedicine technology and a CT scanner that enables brain imaging for quicker and more accurate diagnoses.
The stroke unit will be the first of its kind in the Chicago area and one of only a handful in the entire country. It is expected to be operational in January.
Patients now must wait until arriving at the hospital to be treated for strokes.
“This new mobile stroke treatment unit will bring immediate stroke diagnosis and treatment to patients at their homes, or wherever they’re in need, which will improve their chances of a good recovery,” Dr. James Conners, medical director of the Mobile Stroke UniT, said in the Rush University Medical Center press release.
Dr. Demetrius Lopes, surgical director of the Rush Comprehensive Stroke Center, added that the ambulance will give doctors the ability to check patients for “bleeding in the brain or blockage in their blood vessels.”
“This ability is crucial, since stroke treatment decisions depend on CT imaging of the brain,” Lopes said.
This story has been changed to include additional remarks from Rush Oak Park CEO Bruce Elegant and information about Rush’s new mobile stroke treatment unit.