Mount Sinai Medical Center is moving to expand its impact in South Florida to Westchester as it breaks ground on a new state-of-art emergency center at 8200 SW Eighth St.
“The building is going to bring critical services to the community; emergency services,” said Matt Barnard, associate vice president of planning and construction at Mount Sinai Medical Center.
“It’s 26 bays,” he said. “We have a behavioral health Baker Act intake bay, in addition to standard ED [emergency department] bays. It has full imaging capabilities for not only the ED support, but also for outpatient imaging capability.
“So it’s a fully capable, freestanding emergency department. It’s actually the largest satellite emergency department that we have, so we’re really putting our best foot forward there in Westchester, and it will have all state-of-the-art technology throughout.”
The new facility will bring Mount Sinai’s quality care into the community, he said. The ED is the first phase. However, the will ultimately have full hospital capabilities, he said.
“It’s not only going to serve the immediate needs of that community and reduce travel distances for emergency care and primary care,” said Mr. Barnard, “but it’s also going to act as a portal for that community to the full range of Mount Sinai services, and so they’re going to benefit from our cardiac program, oncology program, urology, orthopedics and … behavioral health. We are bringing a good sampling of everything Mount Sinai is already well known for to this new community, and reducing their travel time to get health care in their market.”
The first phase, which is the emergency department, is under construction and is targeted to be completed for the second quarter of 2026.
“That is also going to be the shell of the main building,” he said. “It’s a four-story building. Phase one is the overall building, all the support services, like the emergency power plants and the medical gas tank farm that serves that building and the … emergency department on the ground floor. The second phase will be a build-out of those upper floors, which is our surgical services and our inpatient services. And then the final phase will be our physician practice space, so doctors’ offices and the support services for that.”
The expansion will not be physically vertical, explained Mr. Barnard. The building is going to be finite when phase one is completed. However, the upper floors will be infilled.
“We are primarily self-funded,” said Mr. Barnard. “We have been recipients of a behavioral health grant … so there’s partial support there, and we’re thankful for that additional support, but the building is primarily self-funded.”
The decision to join the Westchester community is a result of what patients have expressed.
In 2018, said Mr. Barnard, Mount Sinai completed its freestanding emergency department in Hialeah.
“It’s been very well received by the community, and some of the comments that our patients there have expressed to us is that they wish that there was a greater presence from Mount Sinai,” he said, “so that should they need to be in an impatient capacity, instead of having to go all the way back to Miami Beach, they wanted something that was more localized, something that was part of their community.”
Mr. Bernard shared that Mount Sinai’s market research noted Westchester’s situation was very similar to what Hialeah had previously been in.
There are opportunities in the “market to improve access to healthcare for that community and also create a footprint that was robust enough to support the volume from Hialeah as well,” he said. “So we see this as something that is certainly a shared resource for the broad Dade County community, but uniquely beneficial for the Westchester community.”
Mount Sinai’s new facility is expected to cater to many individuals.
“We’re very excited to be in the community … this is in response to a lot of the feedback that we’ve gotten from our Hialeah facility,” said Mr. Barnard. “It’s the same architectural firm. We’ve taken very similar approaches to not only the design of the building but the layout. The program is more robust.
“This will be a hospital in a true sense,” he continued. “It’s a micro hospital, but that simply means the number of beds, not the services that are provided. So we’re excited to be able to fill that need and provide alternatives for the Westchester patient population.”
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