HSHS St. Elizabeth’s Hospital is revamping its emergency department, adding more patient rooms and building a new surgery center at its campus just north of I-64 in O’Fallon, Illinois.
Officials said the $116 million project is necessary to meet the need of an aging population that requires more hospital services.
“We have all these patients, we have all this opportunity, but we don't have space,” said Michael Janis, chief operating officer of HSHS Southern Illinois. “We’ve outgrown our space.”
More than half the cost of the updates will go toward doubling the capacity of the hospital’s emergency department. St. Elizabeth’s is adding eight more treatment rooms to the department, upgrading security and installing X-ray and CT imaging machines that hospital executives say will make for faster diagnoses.
Officials said that the emergency department at the hospital regularly sees 180 patients each day.
Other improvements to the existing hospital will include adding 32 inpatient rooms and building a new kitchen and cafeteria.
The other portion of the project’s cost will go to a new three-story building that will house operating suites, imaging equipment and medical offices, a project the health system first announced last year.
Diverting ambulatory patients to another building will make the main hospital less crowded, Janis said.
HSHS, a health system that operates 15 hospitals throughout Illinois and Wisconsin, took over running the 144-bed hospital in 2017.
Aging patients
According to a report on the project from the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board, the region around the hospital is projected to see a slight decline in population by next year.
That continues a trend in southern Illinois. Counties throughout the Metro East have seen declining or stagnant numbers of residents in the past decade, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
Even so, the number of patients using St. Elizabeth’s services will likely increase, Klay said. That’s because the average age of the people who live in the Metro East is going up.
“What we know from a clinical perspective is that population of patients [is] seeking care at higher rates,” he said.
According to state review board documents, the population age 65 and above in the area is expected to increase by 13% by 2026.
Klay said an estimated 9,000 patients annually in the St. Elizabeth’s service area travel to St. Louis hospitals for treatment instead of staying in the Metro East.
“So that's the opportunity for us, and it really does boil down to access,” he said. “We have to create easy access for our patients, and we believe that these investments will do that.”
The new surgery building means the hospital could add specialty care options that patients had been seeking at hospitals across the river in St. Louis, Janis said.
“We feel that this gives us the opportunity to decompress the volume that we see in our own space today,” he said. “And gives us the opportunity…to keep patients local and provide an environment that is affordable.”
HSHS officials expect the surgical center to be complete by October 2026. They did not offer a completion date for the main hospital’s renovations, but documents from the state’s review board indicate a December 2027 completion date.
