Work continues on renovating an empty medical building that will hold the state medical examiners’ office when it moves out of Concord Hospital next year to deal with a long-running increase in workload.
“The medical examiner space will be ready to be occupied this summer,” said Rob Prunier, one of the owners of Harvey Construction, the lead contractor on the project at 279 Pleasant St. “It’s a pretty thorough renovation. Systems have been sitting there for a while, so the mechanical, electrical systems are updated, floor plan had to be modified. … With exterior improvements, parking, landscape, it’ll look like a new space.”
The medical examiner’s office, which determines the cause of sudden or unnatural deaths, has been in Concord Hospital since the modern office was created by the late Dr. Roger Fossum more than 35 years ago. It leases offices there as well as morgue space for hundreds of autopsies annually.
The medical examiner’s workload soared when the opioid epidemic hit, with overdoses in 2022 causing some two-thirds of all deaths to be autopsied. At one point, Dr. Jennie Duval, the state medical examiner, was performing nearly 300 autopsies a year, exceeding the limit of 250 for pathologists set by national accreditation standards. The addition of a third pathologist has lessened that strain but not the total workload.
“The number of autopsies has increased 30% to 50% in recent years and is expected to increase more,” Attorney General John Formella wrote in an August report to the governor and executive council, since the medical examiner is part of the Department of Justice. “The number of bodies being autopsied often exceeds the capacity of the current morgue, which then requires OCME to incur off-site cadaver storage and transportation costs.”
The solution was to create a specialized morgue with autopsy and office space on the other side of Pleasant Street. It will occupy a building that once housed Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center’s primary care facilities in Concord before they moved up the street to their current location. Concord Hospital’s parent company bought the site in 2018 and it has been empty since.
Construction began after the Executive Council approved 30-year lease with a total cost of slightly over $37 million, with annual rent starting at about $900,000 a year. The medical examiner will occupy 10,500 square feet on the ground floor, including morgue space to hold up to 45 bodies – more than twice the figure at Concord Hospital.
The second floor of the building will be used by Concord Hospital for internal administration.
“It won’t be any type of patient care,” said Genevieve Armstrong, public relations coordinator at the hospital.
The rental agreement begins March 1, with the state’s lease in Concord Hospital ending in September.