URMC Cuts Ribbon on Upstate’s Largest Ambulatory Surgery Center

On Thursday, July 30, URMC marked the opening of upstate New York’s largest hospital-affiliated ambulatory surgery center, featuring 10 operating suites and three procedure rooms equipped with advanced technology, plus roomy facilities built to enhance patient comfort and privacy.

Essential to the region’s health care delivery system and a focal point of the Medical Center’s Strategic Plan, the new center offers welcome relief to a busy surgical enterprise, which recently has experienced a steady surge in urgent, high-acuity specialty care. These critical cases have placed more and more demand on Strong Memorial’s existing operating suites, forcing many elective and pre-scheduled procedures to either wait or be performed at other outpatient surgical centers altogether. Meanwhile, thanks to promising minimally invasive technologies, improved anesthesia techniques and other innovations, surgeries that formerly required hospital stays can increasingly be performed as outpatient procedures. (In 1980, about 10 percent of Strong Memorial’s surgeries were ambulatory procedures; by 2005, that number had climbed to 50 percent, making it the hospital’s fastest growing clinical activity.)

URMC Surgery Center will open its doors to patients on Aug. 10, and anticipates that 8,500 procedures will be completed at the center in its first year, including orthopaedic, otolaryngology and plastic surgery cases, as well as some colorectal procedures. By its third year, the Center’s capacity could reach 18,000 procedures annually. Because the Center will exclusively perform elective, pre-scheduled surgeries, it can operate with superb efficiency, without the hassle of shifting schedules to accommodate emergencies.

URMC partnered with local real estate developer Castle Office Group, LLC, to develop the 80,000-square-foot medical facility at 180 Sawgrass Drive, just off Westfall Road in Brighton. The URMC Surgery Center occupies 52,000 square feet on the building’s main floor (including operating and procedures rooms, private pre- and post-anesthesia areas, plus a pharmacy), and its second floor soon will be home to URMC’s Pain Treatment Center and Division of Colorectal Surgery (opening in August and September respectively), plus a Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endoscopy Center (slated to open in January 2010).

The new center is just one of three major building projects enumerated in the Medical Center’s Strategic Plan. Earlier this summer, URMC began construction on its Clinical and Translational Science Building (CTSB), a $76.4 million project that will serve as a central hub for the resources, expertise, and networks necessary to fast-track biomedical research into real-word cures. The imaging and inpatient bed expansion project continues to remain on hold due to the nation’s economic downturn.

For more information on (and photos of) the new URMC Surgery Center, click here.