PORTLAND, Maine—Colliers Project Leaders | USA is delivering comprehensive project management and owner’s representative services on extensive expansions to Maine Medical Center in Portland. The multi-phased project includes a new, 270,000-square-foot inpatient tower, a new patient and visitor parking garage providing 225 additional spots, a three-story expansion to the East Tower and a 110,000-square-foot medical office building for neuroscience, vascular surgery and ENT, as well as a 2,450-car parking garage for staff. Delivered in four phases, the $534 million project is the largest expansion in Maine Medical Center’s history. The Colliers team is led by Dominic Gagnon, Senior Vice President, Adam Troidl, Vice President, Coleman Joyce, Senior Project Manager, and Ashley Roan, Project Coordinator.

The first phase involved a three-story overbuild on the current eight-story Patient & Visitor Parking Garage providing 225 additional parking spaces, as well as an additional three-story overbuild on the current East Tower, which created two-stories for 64 inpatient oncology beds and two rooftop helipads. The second phase of construction focuses on the new, state-of-the-art staff parking garage. This 9-level garage is the largest north of the Boston metro area and provides staff with 2,450 new spaces and a technologically empowered system to measure vacancies.

The third phase of construction, targeted for completion in 2023, involves the creation of a new 270,000-square-foot inpatient tower with 96 beds and 19 procedure rooms, as well as a universal room concept to achieve flexibility and reduce the possibility of future renovations. Finally, the independent phase involves the construction of a new, 110,000-square-foot medical office building on the medical center’s Scarborough Campus. This new center will house neuroscience, vascular surgery and ENT practices.

“As the physician leader on our building project, I have found the project support, knowledge base and management that Colliers provides to be invaluable,” said Michael R. Baumann, MD, FACEP, Chair, Department of Emergency Medicine, MaineHealth. “They are extremely knowledgeable in all aspects of the project and provide overall management of the building with ease and elegance.”

“Trust is the buzz word in healthcare in 2020, and we had absolute trust in the work being done by Colliers,” said Joel Botler, MD, Chief Medical Officer, MaineHealth. “Like Colliers, one of our core values is ownership and they define that value.”

“Colliers is honored to deliver an innovative facility to meet the most urgent healthcare needs of the future,” said Gagnon. “This new expansion will help empower Maine Medical Center to champion patient care and research for decades to come.”

Colliers is working closely with Perkins & Will, Turner Construction, Thornton Tomasetti, Consigli Construction and SMRT to deliver the expansion.

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The clinical trial, led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (SFGH), followed 135 people treated for mild traumatic brain injuries over the past two years at one of three urban hospitals with level-one trauma centers. Often, brain injuries can result from serious car accidents and can impact someone for the rest of their lives. This being the case, those involved may want to reach out to lawyers for help with a severe head injury lawsuit to assist them in getting some kind of justice for their harrowing experience. The three hospitals involved in the study, called National Institutes of Health-funded TRACK-TBI (Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury), were SFGH, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the University Medical Center Breckenridge in Austin, Texas.

The 135 patients received CT scans upon admittance to the hospital and were given MRIs about a week after. Ninety-nine of them had “normal” CT scans, but 27 of those 99 patients had detectable spots on their MRI scans showing signs of microscopic bleeding in the brain. These focal lesions helped the doctors predict whether the patients would suffer persistent neurological problems. As of now, 15 percent of patients with mild traumatic brain injuries suffer long-term neurological problems, but doctors don’t have a way to predict the outcome of this devastating personal injury.

“This work raises questions of how we’re currently managing patients via CT scan,” said senior author on the study Geoff Manley, MD, PhD, the chief of neurosurgery at SFGH and vice-chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery at UCSF in a statement. “Having a normal CT scan doesn’t, in fact, say you’re normal.”

More than 1.7 million Americans receive medical attention for head injuries every year, and 75 percent of them have mild traumatic brain injuries. However, only injuries bad enough to seek attention from an emergency room are included, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which means many more mild traumatic brain injuries happen every year. Many traumatic brain injuries that require hospitalization result in the services of Mann Injury Law Firm being required to protect the best interests of victims in the aftermath of this kind of incident. Most patients that do show up are treated and released without being admitted to the hospital. While several of them have a full recovery, one in six develop chronic and occasionally permanent disability. If this does happen, and they end up with a permanent disability, life as they knew it will never be the same again. Some may find it hard to get a job, and even if they do, the extent of their disability may mean that they spend more time away from the workplace than in it, which could be disheartening for a lot of people. Loss of income could start to take place in this situation, and as a result, individuals may start looking for long term disability insurance quotes, which means that they will still earn a portion of their salary if they are unable to work for a long period of time. This could provide a sense of motivation for the person, especially when they have a permanent disability, as they will know that there are options out there that can help to increase their quality of life.

The article, “Magnetic Resonance Imaging Improves 3-Month Outcome Prediction in Mild Traumatic Brain Injury,” is a significant step in finding a quantitative approach to detecting, monitoring and treating mild traumatic brain injuries.

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