Kaiser Permanente officially broke ground on May 7, 2004 on a new patient tower at West Los Angeles Medical Center. Developed by contractor McCarthy of Newport Beach, Calif., the new West Wing Tower will replace one of the existing hospital towers built in 1974. The $80-million project includes construction of the five-level, 200,000-sf tower and a 65-foot long connecting structure that will join all five floors of the tower to the existing south and center towers. Being built on an existing parking lot at the medical center, the new tower will house an emergency department with radiology and lab services; an admitting and waiting area; five new inpatient operating rooms with central sterile facilities; an inpatient pharmacy; a labor and delivery department with two C-Section rooms and eight labor delivery recovery postpartum rooms; family-centered care and a nursery; medical/surgical units each with 26 beds totaling 106 licensed beds; and a parking structure.
Designed by HMC Architects of Ontario, Calif., the tower will be built to accommodate computer infrastructure for Kaiser Permanente’s automated medical record system known as Health Connect. Nurses stations and procedure rooms will boast the Picture Archiving and Communications (PAC) system which routes images displayed on flat-panel monitors, which are also accessible to surgeons in the operating rooms.
