Maine Medical Center unveils $40M operating room wing

Photo / James McCarthy Richard W. Petersen, president and CEO of Maine Medical Center in Portland, opens the unveiling of the hospital's new $40 million two-story operating wing Monday by noting the project was completed “on budget and on time.”

Photo / James McCarthy Instead of a traditional ribbon-cutting, members of a Maine Medical Center surgical team don their scrubs to mark the completion of the Portland hospital's new $40 million operating wing, which is slated to open Oct. 19.

Photo / James McCarthy Each of the five new operating rooms in Maine Medical Center's new $40 million expansion is 600 square feet, roughly double the size of the hospital's operating rooms built in the early 1980s.

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By James McCarthy

Portland’s Maine Medical Center unveiled its state-of-the-art $40 million operating wing Monday, a two-story vertical expansion erected on top of the medical center’s lower Bean Building near the emergency department.

The 41,361-square-foot building — featuring five operating rooms and 20 pre-op and post-op recovery rooms for patients — was completed “on budget and on time,” MMC President and CEO Richard W. Petersen told a gathering of hospital employees and members of the public who were invited to Monday’s open house. The new wing’s first day of operation is slated for Oct. 19.

“We ended up with a facility we can all be proud of,” Petersen said of the expansion, which is housed in glassed-in structure that provides a distinctly 21st century contrast to the red brick façade of the hospital’s original 19th century buildings. The new wing includes a sun-filled family room supported by a $200,000 donation from KeyBank.

Dr. Brad Cushing, chairman of MMC’s surgery department, described the new operating rooms as “world class” surgical spaces that are roughly double the size of MMC’s operating rooms built in the early 1980s. The additional space, he said, is needed to accommodate the additional medical equipment and medical specialists utilized in today’s minimally invasive surgical procedures that allow for much faster recovery times and shorter hospital stays for patients.

“We are the safety net for the state,” added Dr. Robert Ecker, a neurosurgeon who noted that patients with life-threatening injuries or conditions requiring neurosurgery are often delivered to the Portland hospital to receive specialized care that may not be available at their local hospitals or health clinics.

The hospital currently performs approximately one-third of all inpatient surgeries in the state, including 45% of “interventional cardiology,” a branch of cardiology involving the catheter-based treatment of structural heart diseases. Its existing operating rooms had a utilization rate of up to 94%, which was cited in the hospital’s certificate-of-need application as higher than the optimum industry standard of 80%.

A “cardiac hybrid operating room for advanced surgeries,” slated to open next summer in a converted older operating room, will enable the hospital to increase the number of minimally invasive cardiac surgeries it can perform, hospital officials said.

The five new operating rooms are equipped with high-definition medical video-technology that facilitates minimally invasive surgical procedures by giving surgeons an enhanced view of patient anatomy. Doctors can look at either large wall-mounted flat screens or smaller screens closer to the surgical table that can be swiveled in any direction. They also have the latest tele-conferencing technology, energy-efficiency systems designed for sterile operating room environmental control and LED lighting systems.

MMC received its certificate-of-need approval from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services in February 2014. Perkins + Will, a global architecture and design firm with an office in Boston, is the architect of the project. Suffolk Construction, also based in Boston, started construction in February 2014 and completed the job last month.