A rendering of the proposed East Tower that is planned to be built at the WVU Medicine Camden Clark Medical Center The 138,800-square-foot facility will include four additional surgical suites; a proposed women’s and children’s floor offering private labor, delivery, recovery, and postpartum rooms, along with two dedicated operating rooms for cesarean sections onsite; and 450 additional parking spaces. The building is expected to open in May 2029. (Photo provided)

PARKERSBURG – The Camden Clark Medical Center will be expanding into a new patient tower by the end of the decade that will specialize in care for women and children.

WVU Medicine officials announced this week a $135 million investment that will create the new East Tower, a five-floor (with four floors that can be occupied) 138,800-square-foot facility that will include four additional surgical suites; a proposed women’s and children’s floor offering private labor, delivery, recovery, and postpartum rooms, along with two dedicated operating rooms for cesarean sections onsite; and 450 additional parking spaces.

“This has been several years in the making,” said Camden Clark President and CEO Sean Smith. “This is a huge investment in the downtown area and will bring in more jobs (50-60 new jobs in nursing, environmental support and more).

“Most importantly it is an investment in the healthcare in our community. I think this is an exciting time for us here at Camden and I think to advance healthcare in the Mid-Ohio Valley this will be a wonderful addition.”

Smith said the total project will be a $150 million investment and they are looking at raising around $15 million from philanthropic efforts to help finance the project, he said.

The new East Tower will be built on the spot where the former Medical Office Building C used to stand near Community Bank.

The East Tower will have a reception/registration area and four outpatient operating rooms on the ground floor. On both the next two floors there will be medical and surgical rooms. On the next floor, there will be a Women’s and Children’s Unit with all the associated services. There is also a fifth floor for mechanical, electrical, plumbing and other systems.

The project will also include 450 parking spaces to support the tower, Smith said adding those will be for patients, visitors, patients and staff.

“We will continue work on some other avenues to address parking,” he said.

The East Tower will have two connectors to the main hospital building providing access to and from the hospital’s South Tower. Officials are currently working on how and where those will be placed, Smith said.

“”Because this will be connected to an acute care hospital we do believe it will be the safest place to deliver babies in the Mid-Ohio Valley,” he said. “I think this is a huge win for our community.”

The creation of the East Tower has grown from the hospital needing to address issues with the mechanical, electrical, plumbing and other infrastructure systems in the North Tower where parts of it are 60-90-years-old.

“This allows us the latitude to make those decisions,” Smith said of the East Tower.

Smith said they have had experts in over the past several years evaluating the North Tower. Hospital officials are continually reacting to deterioration.

“(The new East Tower) allows us to clear up space to address the aging facility without having to compromise patient capacity and allows us to update our facility,” he said.

The creation of the East Tower will lead to the medical center eventually converting to all private rooms.

The East Tower will have 88 private beds. The new tower will increase the hospital’s total inpatient bed capacity from 268 to 302 and put the hospital on the path to all private rooms, Smith said.

“That is the contemporary model and that is the expectations of our patients,” he said.

The hospital is using a group called IKM to design the facility. IKM designed the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Morgantown.

“They have a lot of experience in the healthcare space,” Smith said. “They have been wonderful partners. I think our community will respond extremely well to this tower.”

Smith said the building of the East Tower is starting with four floors with the opportunity to eventually build up four more stories so they could add another 140 beds to the East Tower at some point in the future.

“Health care is changing and technology is changing,” he said. “This will allow us to design and update the rooms to be able to meet the needs of our patients that we never would have been able to do before.”

They are looking ahead at the possibility of incorporating artificial intelligence and other technology in interacting and communicating with their patients and this new facility will help with that.

“As the hospital offers new services, it creates capacity issues,” Smith said. “We are a regional referral center and we have to be reliable and dependable, especially for our outside and rural markets.

“When a patient comes to Camden, we need to be able to receive that patient in a timely manner.”

Physicians and staff have had a hand in helping to design the new East Tower.

“It is critical as they are the ones taking care of our patients and they know the intricacies of what our patients go through every day,” Smith said.

Hospital officials have some of the schematic design work done for the East Tower. They will finish the final design by July of this year and start doing site development by September-October.

They are anticipating breaking ground on the project in February 2027, Smith said. It will be expected to be a two-year project with construction expected to be done by March 2029 and the building opening to patients in May 2029, he added.

“The sky is the limit as we are building this,” Smith said.

Contact Brett Dunlap at bdunlap@newsandsentinel.com