“We are pleased the Board of Curators has fully endorsed our plan to create a centralized, integrated clinical campus in Columbia and build a new hospital pavilion for women’s and children’s services on our central campus.

This is most certainly a milestone for our health system as we embark on one of the largest building projects in our health system’s history to create a centralized hub for inpatient and specialty services that will allow us to continue saving and improving lives for years to come. This path forward allows us to build on our strength, invest in our organization’s future and propel us toward regional and national recognition as leaders in children’s and women’s health.

A centralized, integrated campus provides an opportunity to not only drive increased collaboration across specialties and create space for growth, but also to create new pathways for our faculty physicians and employees to grow their careers through expanded teaching and research opportunities. Furthermore, we also anticipate this integration will improve recruitment efforts in key subspecialties.

Already, we are maximizing existing space and creating additional capacity at University Hospital and the Missouri Orthopaedic Institute, even beyond the demands for physical space COVID-19 has placed on our health system. We anticipate shifting some service lines from Women’s and Children’s Hospital to the central campus beginning in fall 2021, with completion of the new tower and full integration of services to follow in summer 2024.

We recognize planning a new building and a move of services from one campus to another is a large and complicated undertaking. Already, we are working with more than 40 multi-disciplinary teams and hundreds of individuals – including physicians and employees in a variety of roles from many departments across the organization – to ensure we consider the perspectives and insights of all those who will be affected by these changes.

We are committed to keeping our employees, our patients and the community informed as our plans advance, and we look forward to our bright future as a health system.”

For more information, visit muhealth.org/clinical-integration

Downloadable assets, including renderings of the building, are available here.