Hospital of the future

With a vision to provide a cutting-edge and forward-looking campus, Lee Health's new healthcare destination campus will provide accessible, best-in-class care while accommodating significant future growth and evolving community health needs.

To ensure the community has access to comprehensive care, the campus will house a full-service hospital, as well as ancillary and social services and a medical office building supporting an orthopedic center of excellence and outpatient surgery center. The campus will also feature neurosurgical and surgical optimization clinics.

With a goal of supporting the growing community, Lee Health worked with Flad to define the services necessary and right-size the program and space to support those services. The resulting community hospital program will include features like a complex care clinic and specialty clinics that support the wider region.

Flad worked closely with Lee Health to balance a tight budget in an inflationary environment with the need to provide care spaces capable of flexing over long durations to incorporate new technologies and over shorter durations to accommodate seasonal and situational surges in patient volumes.

The facilities will span over 520,000 square feet, with 393,000 square feet dedicated to the hospital and 127,000 square feet to the medical office building. The innovative hospital will include 144 medical/surgical beds, 24 ICU beds, 18 operating rooms, and a 44-bed emergency department.

Schematic design was originally intended to start during the week that Hurricane Ian made a direct hit on the Southwest Florida coast, devasting the Fort Myers region. This experience led the team to implement lessons learned from the Category 4 storm, including raising critical infrastructure above code-required elevations, raising staff parking areas to prevent widespread flooding of cars, and including multiple wells to ensure uninterrupted operations in the event of loss of community infrastructure.