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The game of musical chairs has begun for Indiana University School of Medicine, which will undergo a huge reshuffling of offices, classrooms and clinical space in coming years in conjunction with the expansion of the Methodist Hospital campus downtown.
In one of the first steps, the IU Board of Trustees on Friday approved a renovation project to provide new space for the medical school’s Family Medicine Center on the IUPUI campus.
The center, which is home to one of the medical school’s largest programs, will move from its current location at Senate Avenue and 15th Street to the IUPUI campus.
The first and second floors of the Dunlap Building, as well as a small portion of the nearby Health Sciences Building, will be renovated to make room for the Family Medicine Center.
The renovation will create examination rooms, procedure rooms, clinical spaces, offices, administrative workstations, and conference and classroom spaces.
The relocation will double the Family Medicine Center’s size, “so it may more adequately support its residency program and related patient volume,” IU said in a press release. It did not provide details on square footage or the cost of the renovation and move.
The current center will be demolished to clear this site for new IU School of Medicine classrooms, as part of Indiana University Health’s huge expansion of its downtown campus.
The medical school plans to move the bulk of its classrooms and operations into a new $245 million building on the expanded Methodist Hospital campus in 2024.
In February, the IU Board of Trustees approved the new site, which is west of Senate Avenue and just south of the IU Neurosciences Research Building and the IU Health Neuroscience Center on 16th Street.
IU Health unveiled the new campus plan last summer. It will expand the Methodist Hospital campus by eight blocks, or 44 acres.
Operations at Methodist Hospital and IU Health University Hospital, which is 1.5 miles southwest of the IUPUI campus, will be consolidated into a new $1.6 billion hospital when it opens in 2026. The future use of the two current hospitals is still under evaluation.
The consolidation of two hospitals is designed to eliminate costly duplication of medical services and help provide more accessible, cost-efficient care, IU Health has said. The oldest portion of Methodist Hospital dates to 1908, while University Hospital opened in 1970.
All along, the goal of the huge new urban campus has been to incorporate the medical school alongside the new hospital. IU has said for more than a year that it planned to move to the expanded campus, about two miles north of its current location.
Family medicine is one of the largest specialties among medical residency programs at the medical school. New doctors in the residency program get training in six major areas of medicine: pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, internal medicine, psychiatry and neurology, surgery, and community medicine.
This spring, the top five specialties that IU School of Medicine students got accepted into for residency programs were internal medicine, family medicine, anesthesiology, pediatrics and emergency medicine.
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Do you mean to say that Methodist Hospital and University Hospital, which is 1.5 miles away on the IUPUI campus, will be consolidated in the plan? And do you mean to say that school and IU Health officials have yet to decide what to do with the existing hospital buildings and sites?
Indeed, not clear what this all entrails.