North Alabama Regional Medical Center to Enhance Regional Health Care

FLORENCE, Ala. — A groundbreaking ceremony was held Nov. 2 for the new 485,000-square-foot North Alabama Regional Medical Center in Florence. The project has finally come to fruition after more than six years, when RegionalCare Hospital Partners first purchased Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital with the promise of replacing it with a new facility.

While the new 280-bed regional medical center will replace the aging hospital, its main goal is to broaden the radius from which patients come for treatment, offering more health care opportunities to regional residents, reported TimesDaily, a local news outlet. The current hospital opened in 1944 and has been added onto over the years, with its latest major addition being completed in 1989, according to TimesDaily.

Utah-based Layton Construction is serving as the project’s construction manager and began moving equipment to the 23-acre site in mid-October. Construction is scheduled to take about two years, so the new facility should be open to the public at the end of 2018.

The new medical center is expected to cost $250 million — $230 million of which will go to construction and $20 million for new medical equipment, according to TimesDaily. Large, all-private patient rooms and more efficiently located treatment departments will highlight the new facility. It will also house adjacent surgical, interventional and diagnostic services on the first floor, reported Quad Cities Daily News.