[sodak]

Sioux Valley Hospital has announced a $400 million donation and the creation of Sanford Health.

This will be the landmark economic event in the history of Sioux Falls. Transforming the landscape and the economy to one centered on health and research in addition to finance, insurance and bioenergy. The next 10 years will dramatically alter the landscape and put Sioux Falls on the map for the world's most renowned health centers. It sounds like the focus will be pediatrics.

One of the largest ever donations to a medical center may enable Sioux Valley Hospitals and Health System to transform itself into a world-class research institution aimed at curing diseases and treating patients across the country.

T. Denny Sanford’s $400 million gift, formally announced today in Sioux Falls, provides what will now become Sanford Health the ammunition to reach targets in the stratosphere of health care and medical research, according to Sanford Health CEO Kelby Krabbenhoft

Eventually, 20 separate specialized facilities will be joined in a world class medical center, Link says. In total, Sanford’s donation is estimated to result in 9,200 new jobs at Sanford Health and related enterprises – including jobs in other industries such as construction that will grow along with the health system – and it will have a $1.15 billion impact on the regional economy, according to a study done by Randall Stuefen

http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070203/NEWS/70203002

[fredstrom]

Hell frickin ya!

Damn, what a confluence of news up there. Sounds like the latter half of this decade will define Sioux Falls for the next several decades.

[Justin_144]

With one large project comes another...sounds great

Here are some low quality screen shots I took while the video was showing what the campus would look like.
http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/9425/sanfordjk0.jpg

[fredstrom]

what would the dome be for? it looks like it is just enclousing seperate buildings. to create large climate controlled space?

[sodak]

I'm not sure what the dome's actual purpose will be. I bet we'll hear more in the next couple of days though.

Just the idea of 10,000 new health care jobs and the hundreds of millions in new construction is remarkable. This is off the hook!

[Justin_144]

Computer-generated graphics help us understand what the new Sanford Health Campus of the Future could look like in the years to come.

Several new buildings will be constructed around the existing hospital in the center of Sioux Falls. They'll be specifically designed to meet the organization's educational and research goals.

Plans are also in the works to build a large dome over four of the new buildings to create a year round, climate controlled area on the campus.

The hospital's network of underground tunnels will be expanded to connect the facilities. The specific details of the plans will be worked out once a research goal is selected for the Sanford Project and Sanford Research.

Hospital officials say the large dome is expected to become an icon and symbol of Sanford Health as the organization grows into a national healthcare authority.

[sodak]

This article talks about how the economic effects of the announcement could lead to a doubling of the city's growth rate. Currently, Sioux Falls grows around 2-2.5% per year. This could increase it to around 4%.

If this all pans out, it will bring Sioux Falls to the next level of cities, not only in the Upper Midwest, but having a name nationally as well.

Can Sioux Falls Handle Sanford Project?
Schools, housing and infrastructure.. The new 400-million dollar expansion plan to Sandford Health Systems amounts to major changes for the City of Sioux Falls.

The hospital's expansion is expected to bring in 92-hundred new jobs to the city. If that happens, it will mean a huge population boom for Sioux Falls.

In fact, city leaders estimate the city will grow at a pace twice as fast as it currently does, meaning there could be
another 70-thousand people living in Sioux Falls over the next 10 years.

And that has city planners going back to the drawing board.

It's an investment that will change the landscape of Sioux Falls.
"I think we're sitting in pretty good shape, it's just the pace at what we're looking at probably in the next five years is probably going to be faster than what we originally expected," said city planner, Mike Cooper.

And that fast growth, Cooper says, will put additional pressure on existing schools.
The city is updating its 2015 plan and is now looking to development as far out as 2025. It's already mapped out 10 new elementary schools in the city, some of which would be in the Brandon and Harrisburg districts.

Cooper doesn't see housing as a concern, because he says right now there's enough available homes to accommodate future growth. And several areas are being developed east of Sioux Falls that will take city limits all the way to the Big Sioux River.

Over the next few months, the city will take a closer look at its infrastructure to see what areas will need improvements. But Cooper feels confident the Sanford project won't negatively impact the city's sewer system or water supply, especially with the Lewis and Clark water pipeline that will provide the city with additional water.

"The Lewis and Clark pipeline is really designed to deal with worse case scenarios, major growth and drought situations. The good thing is the long range impact we're talking about is going to happen over a period of years, it's not going to happen all in one year."

City planners will meet with the Sioux Falls, Harrisburg and Brandon school districts to talk about the city's future growth and how it'll impact each district. City planners also expect the city's growth to attract higher end restaurants and stores and more development around the hospital's campus.

[Justin_144]

Wow...double thats fantastic

[Justin_144]

A castle look for children's hospital
Published: February 7, 2007

http://cmsimg.argusleader.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=DF&Date=20070207&Category=NEWS01&ArtNo=702070339&Ref=AR&Profile=1001&MaxW=290
A model shows how the Sanford Children's Hospital
might look when it is scheduled to open in spring 2009.


The Sanford Children's Hospital probably will make a striking visual imprint on its central Sioux Falls neighborhood: it's going to look like a castle.

Sanford Health on Saturday announced a $400 million donation from First Premier Bank owner T. Denny Sanford that will allow it to build a new research park, enclosed by a large, heated dome.

It also retired its old name, Sioux Valley Hospitals and Health System.

Plans already were in motion for Sanford Children's Hospital to break ground this spring and open in 2009.

Jan Haugen-Rogers, Sanford vice president of children's services, said the castle theme will help make the hospital child-friendly. Officials say the hospital and research park also will be neighborhood-friendly, with few adverse effects on traffic, parking or infrastructure.

The four-story Sanford Children's Hospital will have a clinic on its ground floor, plus 62 private rooms on its upper three floors. That will absorb the 47 current pediatrics beds in 37 rooms.

A skyway will connect the third floor to the neonatal intensive care unit, in an existing hospital building, Haugen-Rogers said.

Many of the jobs in the new children's hospital will migrate from elsewhere on the Sanford campus. But she said it's possible 30 to 50 new jobs could be added over the first five years.

The exterior will have flags, towers, walls that look like stone and other trappings of a storybook castle, she said.

"We're trying to build it so that children feel really good coming here."

The hospital cost is now estimated at $52 million, a number that has risen since T. Denny Sanford's original gift of $16 million. Sanford Health has raised another $16 million in matching donations, and will cover the rest with its own funds, said Haugen-Rogers.

City officials and Sanford Health executives expect little impact on traffic and city services as the health system expands.

The only change in city infrastructure will be more storm drainage capacity, including new detention ponds. Sanford Health will pick up that bill, said Jeff Schmitt, assistant planning director for Sioux Falls.

Schmitt says the city is in a good position to deal with the new hospital's impacts on traffic and parking. The same is likely true for the research park, though Schmitt says he learned details of that plan at the same time as the general public.

He said the city will work with Sanford on parking capacity and locations. The City Council would have to approve rezoning and the possible closure of Euclid Avenue where it runs through the middle of the research site.

City administrators would also have to approve new property lines and could require improvements to water, sewer and drainage, Schmitt said.

The experience of Rochester, Minn. in dealing with a recent expansion of the Mayo Clinic suggests that the impacts on Sioux Falls' infrastructure could be modest.

"Downtown Rochester is always under construction," said Jeff Ellerbusch, a senior planner with the Rochester-Olmsted Planning Department. "It seems like it's a never-ending thing. A few years ago, there were five cranes over downtown Rochester."

Yet that city has done a good job minimizing the impact of Mayo's four recent projects, though downtown is becoming more congested. The clinic has already studied the possibility of building a light rail system in 10 or 15 years to ease traffic, he said.

The situation is different in Sioux Falls. The city is larger, the construction projects are smaller and the new buildings will be about a mile away from the heart of downtown.

Even during construction of Sanford Children's Hospital there will be few problems, according to Randy Bury, Sanford Health's chief administrative officer.

"In terms of impacts on neighbors, I think it will be pretty minimal," he said

[Justin_144]

Competing hospital vows continued dominance in cardiac, mental health
Published: February 8, 2007

It forced them to re-examine their own dreams.

After Avera Health learned T. Denny Sanford was donating $400 million to what is now Sanford Health and heard chief executive Kelby Krabbenhoft call it a transforming gift that will give the health care system a national reach, "we looked at our own plan yesterday," Avera Health senior vice president of finance James Breckenridge said Wednesday.

Their own plan involves spending about $800 million in the next decade, including $400 million in the next five years. Avera plans to improve outpatient medical services and women's services. It plans to pursue genetically focused research at a neuroscience center on Avera McKennan's campus. They will open a $15 million emergency room at Avera McKennan and ramp up cancer care with a $40 million cancer institute by 2010.

"We're not changing anything," Breckenridge said.

Fred Slunecka, regional president at Avera McKennan, says Sanford's $400 million will not alter the competitive balance of the region's health care systems. "There is nothing in this amount that I can see is a direct threat to my institution," he said Monday.

The South Dakota health care universe has been big enough for both Sanford Health and Avera Health to prosper to this point, and Avera Health's strategic initiatives assume that will continue. It will compete with Sanford Health when it needs to and cooperate when it can, according to Breckenridge.

"We'll partner with anybody anytime on any issue," he said.

The medical centers are not mirror images. With hospitals and clinics in 81 communities in North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota, Avera Health is content with that regional focus, Breckenridge said. It has withdrawn from Colorado and Montana and has no desire to match the national reputation Sanford Health hopes to establish, primarily in children's medicine. Also, where Krabbenhoft said Sanford Health hopes to leverage its $400 million windfall into about $1 billion in reserve funds within 15 years, Breckenridge said at Avera Health, "we take every dollar we make and plow it back into the communities we serve.

"We are not interested in building huge endowments."

Avera Health is vitally interested, however, in maintaining access to investment capital, and a reputation for financial discipline within the organization means "there are all signs of that, absolutely," Breckenridge said. "We will do everything possible to maintain our A-plus rating."

Competitive industry
As much as Avera Health said it looks to cooperate with Sanford Health, it's still a Darwinian world in the health care industry. Dick Howard is vice president for business development for Fairview Health Services, the second-largest health care system in the Twin Cities and the third-largest in Minnesota. "I've spent my career doing mergers and acquisitions," he said, and the first instinct of hospital administrators is survival of the fittest.

"Left to our own devices, there is still the belief we should all be very competitive towards each other," he said. An anticipated shortage of physicians and nurses to serve an aging public only sharpens that instinct, according to Howard.

Market forces greater than any system might force cooperation, however.

"If Medicare doesn't start paying us better, we're all going to go under," Howard said. The increasing cost of delivering care invites shared ventures. The future model might involve "competing for lower level services and cooperating in specialized areas that require a lot of capital and have low volume. It doesn't make sense to duplicate it," he said.

Filling different roles
Sanford Health's push to establish pre-eminence in pediatrics and Avera Health's goal to improve patient care for an ever-aging clientele might leave room for both systems to stake out territory.

The Benedictine Sisters of Yankton and the Presentation Sisters of Aberdeen who founded what is now Avera Health left it with a legacy of concern for the welfare of patients, Breckenridge said. And "the sisters are still on our boards. We're accountable to them. While they're giving the reins more every year to the lay people, they've instilled in us what our mission is. They remind us every day we're in the people business," he said.

"Our core competency is caring for patients, and that's where we're going to remain focused," agrees Slunecka.

To that end, keeping current with medical technology is an imperative, Breckenridge said. He points to Avera Health's plan to install throughout its system 24-hour monitoring of intensive care patients by critical care physicians in Sioux Falls. Information technology makes it possible. Keeping close tabs on patients shortens their stay in ICU and dramatically reduces mortality, Breckenridge said.

Avera Health established dominance in cardiac care in the region with its Heart Hospital opened in 2001, said Slunecka, and it also has carved out a niche in behavioral health, filling what Avera officials saw as a huge need, Breckenridge said, after hospitals in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and Sanford Health dramatically cut back on mental health services. "Today it outstrips our expectations of what we thought it could be," Breckenridge said of the Avera Behavioral Health Center, opened in 2006.

Since 2000, Avera McKennan and the Heart Hospital and Sanford Health have been close to equally matched as competitors for patients in Sioux Falls. At the beginning of the decade, Sanford Health accounted for 55.79 percent of the 38,612 patients discharged from the two health care systems. By 2005, Avera McKennan and the Heart Hospital had pulled incrementally ahead, with 50.39 percent of the 43,178 patients discharged that year, to Sanford Health's 49.61 percent.

Sioux Falls Mayor Dave Munson said "that shows the strength of Sioux Falls as far as being a medical community.

"I think both hospitals fill a need for their respective patients," he said. "I think that will go on."

[Justin_144]

What's With The Dome?

Denny Sanford's $400-million dollar donation to the former Sioux Valley Hospital has four intentions: To invest in Children by creating new pediatric clinics, expand research and fund a specific project in the medical field. And it allows for a new approach to healthcare campus and facility design. But of all the questions raised about the initiatives, one stands out among all others.

Looking over the architect's rendering, it's probably the first thing you'll notice. And the last thing you'd expect, a dome? Over four--yep, four--separate buildings.

The presentation played during Saturday’s announcement revealed details of the plan. DVD: "Sanford Research's success will be further distinguished by working in cooperation with the National Institutes of Health in areas such as cardiology, oncology, nutrition, disabilities and women's health." It all sounds impressive. It looks even more so-- an immense glass dome towering above the Sioux Falls skyline. An icon, if you will, of all that is Sanford Health.

So, what's with the dome? Kelby Krabbenhoft, Sanford Health CEO laughs and says, "The dome. My idea so I'll get blamed for it, but surprise, surprise Kelby would come up with that." Krabbenhoft is quick to recognize the similarities to a proposal made three years ago in an effort to lure the Minnesota Vikings training camp to the city. He jokes, "My staff and those closest to me say that this harkens back to my need to want to cover Howard Wood. So this is a sickness. Maybe we can cure that."

All joking aside, Krabbenhoft says the proposed structure would actually serve a serious role in the recruitment of the scientific superstars needed for the Sanford Research Initiative. He says, "We can sell the idea of going to work, parking underground, never putting on a coat 12 months of the year."

He also sees the dome as building a name for a city often confused with Sioux City. Krabbenhoft explains, "I just don't want anyone to forget it. If they remember South Dakota, great. If they remember Sioux Falls, super. But if it takes a dome for them to remember this is a great place and that's where the best research is going on, let's get it done."

Will it be the Kelby dome? Krabbenhoft says, "No! There will be no naming of anything. My mother stuck that name on me and we'll stop there."

Krabbenhoft also jokes that when he retires, he'll be the guy who has to clean all the glass. As for just how large the dome would be, no one knows at this point, but the world's largest dome in Wales is nearly a square mile in diameter.

[NewDetroit1]

Where at in the city will this be?

[sodak]

Right in the central part. The hospital has already purchased a couple blocks of houses to the south of thier campus along 22nd Street.