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Kaiser Moanalua
to get $68M
makeover
The medical center will get its
first major change in 20 years
Kaiser Permanente Hawaii has received state approval for a $68.45 million expansion and renovation of its Moanalua Medical Center, the first major improvements to the facility since it was built 20 years ago.
Getting larger
A look at Kaiser Permanente Hawaii Moanalua Medical Center's expansion and renovation project.
What: New five-story tower comprising 176,000 square feet, plus renovation of 95,000 square feet of existing space.
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Kaiser said the expansion, approved last month by the state Health Planning and Development Agency, will add 68 licensed acute-care beds, eight operating rooms, six emergency department treatment rooms and five urgent-care treatment spaces.
The state's largest health maintenance organization also said it would need to hire the equivalent of 200 full-time employees to bring its hospital staffing to 1,400 in 2009 from about 1,200 at the end of 2003. Those numbers don't include physicians. Kaiser, which has about 233,000 members, said it expects the expansion to meet the needs of an approximate 37 percent increase in membership, to 319,000, that it projects for 2016.
"We are already kind of struggling with capacity issues as it relates to accommodating our own members who need hospitalization," said Scott Nariyoshi, community relations and communications director of Kaiser Permanente Hawaii. "The other reason for the project is for our planning purposes over the next 10 years due to anticipated membership growth. We're already near capacity now, and with planned membership growth over the next 10 years, it's going to get worse."
Kaiser, which plans to begin construction in May, hopes to start operations on the tower in January 2009. Services in other parts of the medical center will continue during construction.
Funding for the project will come through Kaiser's national program, which controls the purse strings for capital expenditures at the eight Kaiser regions throughout the United States.
Construction will be a joint venture between San Francisco-based McCarthy Building Cos. Inc. and Honolulu-headquartered Kiewit Pacific. Honolulu-based Architects Hawaii Ltd. and Los Angeles-based Anshen +Allen-L.A. will design the facility.
Kaiser factored in the expansion when calculating its request for an 11 percent rate increase that it filed in July with the state Insurance Division. Insurance Commissioner J.P. Schmidt has yet to rule on the request.
"We've been planning this (tower) project for at least three, four years," Nariyoshi said. "We actually needed to do this in the mid- to late '90s, but some issues rose internally and there was a national moratorium because of some financial challenges across the program, especially in California, that delayed plans for doing some of these buildings."
Moanalua Medical Center, which began operation in 1985, was projected to serve a membership of 114,000 that year and 126,500 in 1990. Membership has more than doubled since that first year, with no substantial expansion of facilities. In the meantime, the demand for hospital beds, operating rooms and emergency services has strained operations. For example, demand for hospital beds each day is expected to increase to 318 by 2016 from 250 in 2004.
To keep up with growing demand, the medical center has been forced over time to reconfigure its original design. Among some of the changes were converting broom closets into offices and placing a cardiac catheterization lab between maternity rooms.
"These inefficiencies interfere with the hospital's ability to bend the cost curve and take advantage of new technologies," Kaiser wrote in its presentation to a state panel. "Double-occupancy rooms create a number of problematic issues for the hospital. Gender issues (room assignment), infection control and confidentiality requirements prohibit the use of rooms in an efficient manner."
www.kaiserpermanente.org/locations/hi
