By HFT Staff

The University of Chicago Medicine will build a $633 million, 500,000-square-foot facility dedicated to cancer care on its medical campus on the city’s South Side, representing one of the largest investments by the academic health system for patients and the community. 

The plan for Chicago’s first freestanding clinical cancer center includes the addition of 128 beds. These beds will be dedicated to patients with cancer, allowing UChicago Medicine to open other beds for patients with complex or acute-care needs in areas such as organ transplants, digestive diseases, cardiology, orthopedics and trauma care. This, in turn, will help address some of the capacity constraints for the medical center, whose beds are full most days. 

As a critical first step, UChicago Medicine this week filed a certificate of need request to the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board seeking approval to spend money on design and site planning for the proposed cancer center. 

If approved, the new cancer center will add to an emerging ecosystem of care on the South Side, where community hospitals play a vital role in providing access to care to vulnerable and lower-income patients and where academic health systems like UChicago Medicine play a critical role in treating the sickest patients and those who require complex care. 

A significant portion of the planning and design will focus on the patient and family experience, including making sure all services throughout the care journey are in the same location and creating a healing and stress-reducing environment. 

The cancer center, which includes inpatient and outpatient care, will have a focus on prevention and early detection of cancer and be a hub for research into the more aggressive forms of cancer that affect residents on the South Side and many other communities of color across the country. 

Pending regulatory approval, construction of the new facility will begin in 2023 and open to patients in 2026.