The Need to Grow
The people in our communities deserve high-quality healthcare, including state-of-the-art technology and facilities, and the high-caliber medical professionals who are drawn to them. Over the past 15 years we've invested in new facilities in Ketchum, Meridian, Eagle, Twin Falls, Nampa, and Fruitland. Now it's Boise's turn.
St. Luke’s Boise has had a strong presence in our community for more than 100 years, and some of our facilities are showing their age and need to be modernized. For example, our outdated central power plant needed to be completely replaced and its capacity doubled to meet current and future demands. In 2021, we completed construction on a new central plant.
St. Luke's Boise is our tertiary-level care center. That means Boise is where we provide the broadest range and highest level of critical care services within our health system. These Boise-based critical care services include Idaho’s only Children’s Hospital, St. Luke’s Cancer Institute, and St. Luke’s Heart cardiovascular services. We want to build on the expertise, equipment, and infrastructure already here, maximizing our current investment, making the best use of our resources, and bringing the greatest value to the community.
Health care has shifted to nearly 90% outpatient services, and the medical center design needs to reflect that reality. Fewer patients than ever before require even one overnight stay in the hospital; most receive their treatment as an outpatient and are home recovering the same day. Better integrating clinics and doctors’ offices with our acute care hospital facility will maximize St. Luke’s ability to reduce hospital stays, and therefore reduce patient costs.
In the past, doctors’ offices were blocks or even miles away from the actual hospital, with the doctor seeing patients in the office and once or twice a day checking on patients in the hospital. Today, physicians are regularly involved in activities at the hospital itself. Particularly, in tertiary care centers such as St. Luke’s Boise, the interaction among patients, physicians, diagnostic technicians, and nurses occurs frequently throughout the day. This has required the integration of physician offices not only in the neighborhood of the hospital, but physically connected to the hospital to allow frequent movement of staff and physicians between inpatient and outpatient settings.
Our Boise facility is already at or near capacity. We need more space today, and we’ll need significantly more space, and different types of space, by 2030, when the population of the Treasure Valley is expected to have grown by another 300,000 people. What that means is that every service provided at the hospital will have more patients – from emergency to cardiology to radiology to the Children’s Hospital. As such, we’ll need:
Our Master Plan addresses current and future space needs to serve Boise and the surrounding communities for generations to come. Importantly, all of the proposed development will take place on land already owned by St. Luke’s, thereby preventing sprawl beyond our existing Boise campus footprint.
