Memorial Hermann The Woodlands Medical Center serves the dense suburban communities in the North Houston region. Due to the unprecedented growth and a new Level 2 trauma center designation, the hospital needed to expand its capacity to support the need of the surrounding community. The project consisted of a new 332,000-square-foot bed tower expansion of the hospitals existing garage, sky bridge, central utility plant, and the 150,0000 SF of major backfill renovations.

The new tower adds growth for 138 hospital patient beds giving the campus capacity of over 500+ beds, increase the surgical department by five Operating Rooms, expand the cardiopulmonary department and significantly enlarge the hospital’s imaging department and associated support departments. Further operations will be relocated for registration, critical observation unit, endoscopy suite, Post Anesthesia Care Unit (PACU), conference center, Cath labs, 30 IMU patient bedrooms, cardiology suite, and two and a half floors for future build-out.

To facilitate construction, multiple phases were required to accommodate the busy medical center. To accommodate parking, a temporary parking lot of 200 spaces was created to make way for the extensive site requirements, and a vertical expansion of the existing parking garage, to a 5-story precast parking garage by adding two additional floors totaling 220 parking spaces with a sky bridge connector. In preparation for the new tower’s demands, the next phase focused on the utility and central utility plant expansion.

The site and utility phases allowed the team access to the existing hospital to demolish the south-facing exterior wall with minimal disruption to the campus’s daily routine. Prior to this, the design and management teams worked to evaluate the departments which would be directly affected by the demolition and construction of the tower, these services were then relocated to four separate medical office buildings within the medical center.