Projects include:

Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center on McNair Campus is the priciest hospital underway, coming in at $1.1 billion. The hospital will hold 650 patient beds across its two-tower layout. New facilities for science and translation research, a medical office building and an ambulatory care complex will be included. Construction broke ground in April and it will be completed by 2019.

Memorial Hermann Medical Plaza 4 in The Woodlands will be the costliest medical office being built at $66.5 million. At 175,000 square feet, the six-story building will provide OB-GYN, cardiology, neuroscience, oncology and pediatrics services. It’s set to be completed in February 2017.

“We have four office buildings, with this to be our fifth. We’re doing our best to keep up with all the growth down here in Southern Montgomery County,” said Memorial Hermann The Woodlands CEO Josh Urban at the office’s groundbreaking ceremony in January.

Bay Area Regional Medical Center in Clear Lake is expanding its building by 140,000 square feet, costing $100 million. To better cater to its single-family market, the center will be adding another CT scanner and increasing its emergency department from 11 beds to 23 beds. The inpatient bed count will also increase, bringing the total from 104 to 200 beds. By the close of 2016, most of the construction will be completed. The last work to be done will be the fifth floor, entirely dedicated to women’s services.

“In most of these service lines, there are a couple of drivers that go along with growth. That’s the trigger point for why we’re doing the women’s center,” said Paul McCleary, vice president of business development at Houston-based Medistar Corp., which owns the hospital in a statement. “It’s impossible to be a community hospital and not provide those [women’s services].”

Houston Methodist’s 1 million-square-foot North Tower expansion will cost $697 million and hold nearly 400 inpatient beds. Operating rooms will be gutted and turned into suites. Advanced heart and neurosurgeon rooms will be added to the 22-story structure. Set on the Texas Medical Center campus, the project is estimated to wrap-up in November 2017.

Memorial Hermann Texas Medical Center will be 1.34 million square feet at $650 million with an expected completion date of March 2019.

Memorial Hermann Cypress is the second largest medical center at 165,000 square feet and $35.6 million. It is expected to be complete in August of this year. Already, Memorial Hermann has opened a 5,000-square-foot convenient care center in Cypress in February.

“The opening of our convenient care center in Cypress is the first step to giving the growing community the ability to receive specialty care close-to-home,” said Dan Wolterman, president and CEO of Memorial Hermann Health System.
 

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Hospitals are among the highest consumers of energy among commercial buildings, but the La Grange, Texas, facility still managed to reduce its source energy consumption by nearly 23 percent during the competition, according to Energy Star measurements.

The hospital worked with Houston-based Ridgecrest Energy Advisors, who specializes in reducing energy consumption with operations-based changes rather than capital improvements.

“Energy use reductions came entirely from changing how existing systems were configured and operated,” a statement from the firm said. “Engineers specializing in no-capital-cost energy use reduction performed a thorough analysis of existing systems and their use. Then, it was a matter of fine-tuning these systems to implement what the analysis determined would be necessary.”

Total site energy use was reduced by 35 percent in the first full year after implementation of the changes.

Ridgecrest approached St. Mark’s about reducing their consumption and costs on a shared savings basis.

“St. Mark’s believed that their facility was operating efficiently, and although they didn’t expect much, saw no harm in having third-party experts perform a detailed energy analysis to see if there were ways to be even more efficient,” the firm reported.

The analysis resulted in ten energy conservation measures and, with the approval of St. Mark’s CEO Nathan Staggs and the assistance of Mel Burgess, director of facilities management, the measures were implemented and the actual savings exceeded those predicted.

The hospital reported that the long-term benefits of the changes have helped the staff focus on energy efficiency in a more detailed and measurement-driven way, with increased understanding of how the facility uses energy and how their actions impact its usage levels.

“Another benefit is a greatly improved ability to forecast energy consumption for budgeting and procurement,” Ridgecrest officials said. “The competition has also generated a renewed excitement about energy conservation at all levels of the organization.”

The 245 buildings in the competition achieved cost savings totaling $5.2 million annually and prevented greenhouse gas emissions equal to the emissions from the electricity used annually by more than 3,600 homes.

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