UI health sciences building will help spark collaboration

UIHC is planning many other construction projects

By Vanessa Miller, The Gazette IOWA CITY — Just southeast of where the ballooning University of Iowa Health Care operation is planning to build a new $1 billion inpatient tower, UI President Barbara Wilson on Tuesday surveyed a hole in the ground that will — among many things — make that new tower possible.

“You all know that the growth of UI Hospitals and Clinics is critical to everything we do on this campus,” Wilson told a crowd of administrators, faculty, staff and students during a groundbreaking for the university’s new $249 million Health Sciences Academic Building — an event brought inside due to Tuesday’s blustery conditions.

“You know that we continue to have more demand for our services and for our beds and for our expertise than we can handle,” Wilson said of UIHC. “And so what we’re doing really is constructing a big tower — eventually. But, in order to do that, we have what we fondly call enabling projects.”

The already-underway 263,000-square-foot, six-story Health Sciences Academic Building is one such project — in that it’s clearing the way for the tower’s envisioned locale on or near the current site of the 56-year-old Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center by taking in one of its longtime occupants: The nationally- esteemed Communication Sciences and Disorders department.

The Health Sciences Academic Building — being built on a former parking lot between the Gerdin Athletic Learning Center and UIHC’s parking ramp 4, just west of

the College of Law — also will become the new home of the UI departments of Health and Human Physiology and Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science, enabling not just the tower construction but novel forms of campus collaboration.

“It’s going to be a facility that enhances our educational opportunities, our clinical opportunities, and one of the first buildings that brings together our Carver College of Medicine with our College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,” Wilson said. “And that’s really, I think, one of those hallmarks. It’s going to set the stage for future collaboration, and it’s something I’m really excited about.” All three programs are esteemed in their own right — with the Communication Sciences and Disorders department boasting the No. 2-ranked audiology program and No. 6-ranked speech-language pathology program, according to U.S. News & World Report.

The Health and Human Physiology Department — the biggest in the university’s largest College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, with 2,246 undergraduates and 107 graduate students this fall — will move out of its space in the near-century- old Field House.

And the Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences Department, with 33 percent enrollment growth of late, is “beyond capacity” in its current home in the Medical Education Building, built in 1919.

“It is really, really an honor to be with you and to blaze new trails together,” Richard Shields, chair and department executive officer of the UI Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences Department, said of the other departments slated to share the new space. “I’m so excited about what the future holds.”

UI Chair of Communication Sciences and Disorders Eric Hunter said he, too, sees alignment and opportunity for collaboration between the programs — in their ability to both help people through discovery and help patients needing care.

“That’s the beauty of working with these two programs,” he said, noting the cohesion and crossover also could give UI a recruiting advantage for both students and faculty. “There’s so many synergies … That will be a big draw.”

UI Health and Human Physiology Chair Gary Pierce said his students train across a range of programs to become “future health care practitioners, health-related research scientists, therapeutic rec and child life specialists, and sport recreation executives in the state of Iowa and across this country.”

“The new Health Sciences Academic Building for students and faculty will become a hub for innovative teaching and learning, community outreach, and data, and experiential education, cutting-edge biomedical research, clinical, community health-related research and discovery,” Pierce said.

Although a key part of the campus’ 10-year “modernization plan,” the new health sciences building is just a slice of UI’s expanding health care-construction pie — which includes a $525.6 million hospital in North Liberty; a $95 million two-floor addition to its existing inpatient tower; a $37 million upgrade and expansion of its current emergency room; and a $90 million buildout of two unfinished floors in its 14-story Stead Family Children’s Hospital.

The university also is spending at least $45 million to replace damaged and delaminated windows up and down its 6-year-old, 507,000-square-foot children’s hospital — raising that project’s price tag from an original $270.8 million to $450 million.

Of the university’s growing list of construction projects, its largest is the new 842,000-square-foot inpatient tower — which the campus recently revealed will cost $1 billion, meaning UIHC has more than $2 billion in construction upcoming or underway.

And, on top of all that, the university is in the process of buying Iowa City’s only community hospital — Mercy Iowa City — after the 150-yearold local fixture filed for bankruptcy and had to sell its assets at auction. Although UI has offered to buy Mercy for $28 million — and invest another $25 million into it over the next five years — a judge still must approve the sale at a hearing Nov. 6.

UI officials on Tuesday didn’t answer The Gazette’s questions about where money for the Mercy sale will come from. Regarding the UIHC-related construction underway, funding is coming from a mix of donations, debt, temporary investment income, and building usage funds — or patient revenue.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com