Concord Hospital plans to build a new medical office building in the middle of its Pleasant Street campus, replacing a parking lot between two existing office buildings.
The project was approved by the city planning board a month ago, but details are still being worked out, including who will occupy the building, said Jennifer Dearborn, spokeswoman for the hospital.
Plans call for a four-story, 146,000-square-foot building, slightly more than twice the size of the Memorial Medical Office Building that it will connect with, plus an option of adding roughly 40,000 square feet in the future.
The size of the proposal reflects the importance that the hospital industry has come to place on medical office buildings, which rent or provide space for a variety of health care services, from walk-in clinics to general practitioner’s offices to dental practices to specialty imaging centers and laboratories.
The importance of such is growing with changes in the health care industry, which is seeing many medical services being shifted out of hospitals in an attempt to lower costs and deal with changes in the health insurance market, even as the population ages and requires more health care.
Colliers, a real estate services company, says that vacancy rates for medical office buildings nationwide fell to a record low of 7 percent at the end of 2016, a year that saw more than 22 million square feet of such buildings be built. That includes many walk-in and urgent care clinics built over the past few years, often by entities other than hospitals.
However, recent cuts in what is known as the off-campus reimbursement rule for Medicare has increased the attraction of medical office buildings located alongside hospitals, such as the one set to be built by Concord Hospital.
According to the presentation given to the planning board on March 21 by Chris Nadeau of Nobis Engineering and Richard Pizzi of Lavallee-Brensinger Architects, the building would have four floors, with the top three connected to the Memorial Office Building and the fourth located underneath them because of the slope of the land, only accessible from the back.
The goal is to “try to simplify, consolidate ambulatory services on the entire campus, to make things easier for patients,” Nadeau told the board.
A traffic study indicated that the building would have “minor, non-significant impact” on traffic along Pleasant Street and at nearby intersections, the board was told.
The project was preceded by a new three-tiered parking garage for employees across Langley Parkway, to compensate for the parking spaces that will be lost when the new building is constructed.
Utilities such as electric lines and gas pipelines were moved last summer in preparation. Construction is expected to start this spring. Concord Hospital will own the building; the contractor will be Harvey Construction.
Editor’s note: This story was changed to accurately reflect the vacancy rates for medical office buildings nationwide, which fell to a record low of 7 percent at the end of 2016.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313, or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
