Advocate Health Care looks to build Lake County hospital
By MATT PERA - mpera@nwnewsgroup.com
Advocate Health Care announced plans Friday for a 144-bed, 300,000-square-foot hospital that officials hope would be approved to be constructed in Round Lake.
The health-care system filed a letter of intent Friday with Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board, said Scott Powder, Advocate’s senior vice president of strategy and growth.
“We’ve been looking at Lake County for a couple of years now in terms of looking at what the needs of the community are and whether there are needs going unmet,” Powder said.
The facility would be built on a 57-acre site at the corner of Route 120 and Wilson Road in Round Lake, with the overall cost estimated to be about $230 million.
Advocate’s proposal comes about six weeks after Vista Health System, which manages two hospitals in Waukegan, submitted a letter of intent to the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board to build a similar facility in Lindenhurst, less than 10 miles from the proposed Round Lake site.
The 215,000-square-foot Vista facility would cost $99.8 million and have 140 beds.
Vista President and CEO Barbara Martin said in a written statement that Vista Health would submit its certificate of need application to the planning board “immediately following the 60-day waiting period,” toward the end of this month.
“We are confident our plans are ideal for serving the community and bringing better access to health care to all Lake County communities,” Martin said in the statement.
Powder said Advocate would submit its certificate of need application in March, after the required 60-day waiting period, and anticipated the planning board would consider both proposals this summer. As of now, there is no official timeline for construction if the proposal were to be approved, said Advocate spokesman Tony Mitchell.
“We certainly think that we have a great case for providing care in Lake County,” Powder said. “We think this is a great location ... but at the end of the day, it’s up to the planning board, and they will determine what’s best for the community. And they might decide on [neither], or one or both, and that’s up to them.”
Highlights of Advocate’s proposed Round Lake hospital, Powder said, would be general surgical services, obstetrics, an intensive-care unit, and “a robust cardiac-care program.”
Powder added that many Lake County residents already use facilities run by the faith-based, nonprofit system. The cardiac-care center at Barrington’s Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital was named the top cardiac surgery program in the state based on patient outcomes in national ratings released Oct. 16 by HealthGrades Inc., a health-care rating organization based in Colorado.
Advocate Lutheran General, located in Park Ridge, is a Level I Trauma Center that treats critically injured patients from Lake County.
Powder said that the proposed hospital in Round Lake, which Advocate has proposed as a Level II Trauma Center, would collaborate with both nearby facilities to provide care for its patients.
Round Lake Mayor Bill Gentes said he had been interested in bringing a hospital to the area for several years and it caught Advocate’s attention.
“Advocate was not the only one [to come forward], but Advocate was the most persistent one,” he said. “They had a vision for this area that predated my call for a hospital, [and] we went from there.”
