Dr. Nick Turkal
President and CEO, Aurora Health Care Inc.
Aurora Health Care is working on plans for three new facilities in southeastern Wisconsin, including: a $324 million hospital in Kohler (to replace the Aurora Sheboygan Memorial Medical Center); a $130 million medical office building and outpatient care center in Kenosha; and a $55 million ambulatory surgery center and medical office building at the 84South development in Greenfield.
In a recent conversation with BizTimes Milwaukee editor Andrew Weiland, Turkal explained the rationale behind the projects.
Kohler hospital
“(Sheboygan Memorial Medical Center is) a building that has reached the end of its useful life. It was built about 100 years ago. As we now look at how we design operating rooms, how we design privacy for patients around entry and transportation within the hospital setting, we are in a very different place than we were 100 years ago, or even 15 years ago. As we looked to the future, it was really clear we needed a new and efficient hospital.”
Kenosha
“We have a hospital in Kenosha that is very busy and at capacity. That was part of the reason for our cancer and outpatient center that we constructed a couple of years ago (in Kenosha). That is also now at capacity. What we are creating now in Kenosha is a sizable project near I-94 that includes general surgery, orthopedics, urology, pediatrics. If you look at what has happened since we built the hospital, Kenosha has undergone an explosion of businesses and population. But then in addition to that, we have physicians and offices south of there just into northern Illinois, and we draw quite a number of people from Illinois to our Kenosha facilities. We keep outgrowing the facilities we have. This is based on patient demand.”
Greenfield
“We have such a large presence on the south side with Aurora St. Luke’s. We have more demand for our services than we have space for. We’re trying to make access easier for our patients and our providers. This allows another access point. (The Greenfield facility is) going to include a surgery center, so we will be doing general surgery, things like orthopedics, there. So much of orthopedics has moved to an outpatient setting. We will have a large pediatric presence there, pain management, things like that. We need more space for it. (The facility will) enable us to do more of what we want to do at St. Luke’s, the very highest level of surgery and acute care. The things that are more routine, or outpatient based, we would like to get onto campuses that are very easy for patients to get in and out of.”
