A new $90 million hospital and medical office building offering a range of outpatient and inpatient services is almost ready to open its doors in Patton Township.
Penn Highlands State College is tentatively scheduled to open on Monday, June 17, at 239 Colonnade Boulevard (behind Cracker Barrel and Sheetz) after two years of construction. A public open house is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, June 15.
“As much as this is a very exciting time for Penn Highlands Healthcare, it’s even more so for the Centre County region,” Dr. Trina Abla, Penn Highlands chief medical officer, said during a media tour of the hospital on Thursday. “While there are other hospitals in the region, this new patient-centric hospital that addresses the changing system of health care and will improve access in our community.”
The hospital will be Penn Highlands Healthcare’s ninth and the first the system has built from scratch since forming in 2011, with the other eight joining through mergers. It is labeled a campus of Penn Highlands Huntingdon, which along with Tyrone and now State College constitute Penn Highlands’ Central Region.
“This is the first hospital that we’ve built from the ground up, that met our specifications,” Rhonda Halstead, regional market president for Penn Highlands’ Central Region. “We’ll be able to design the workflows, the culture, everything to meet the needs of Centre County.”
In the past, Abla said, identifying and diagnosing an issue might have required a long hospital stay, but technology and an emphasis on preventative medicine have made it possible to often diagnose and manage conditions on an outpatient basis.
“We designed this hospital with those changes in mind — an emphasis on efficient, patient-centric care that leverages modern technology with a substantial portion of our footprint dedicated to care that can be provided on an outpatient basis with fewer inpatient beds,” Abla said.
While the 82,000-square-foot hospital and 32,000-square-foot medical arts building has a focus on outpatient care, it does also offer inpatient services, including 18 private rooms on the second floor. Each room has large windows and a pass-through door that allows items such as meals and linens to be placed inside without disturbing a sleeping patient or in cases that would require staff to don full protective equipment to enter the room.
The hospital features a surgical department with three high-tech operating suites for surgeries including general, orthopedic, ear nose and throat and gynecological, as well as an endoscopy procedure room.
A pulmonary function lab will have advanced screening, diagnosis and treatment and robotic-assisted bronchoscopy.
“We… have a lung center that boasts some of the most advanced diagnostics that are typically only associated with large urban centers,” Abla said.
On the first-floor, an imaging department with what Abla called a “full gamut” of radiology services — including CAT, MRI, ultrasound, X-ray, nuclear medicine, mobile PET/CT scan, is located near the hospital’s emergency department .
The 24-hour emergency department, accessible at the front entrance of the hospital, includes a trauma room and 10 private treatment rooms. Two are designated safe rooms for behavioral health patients and another is a sexual assault exam room with private bathroom facilities.
The emergency department will be a Level 4 trauma center, meaning it can stabilize patients to be transported to a higher level of care. Penn Highlands DuBois is a Level 2 trauma center.
Outside of the emergency room is a two-ambulance bay with access to a decontamination room. Also near the ambulance bay is a Safe Haven Baby Box —a safety device provided under Pennsylvania’s safe haven law that allows mothers to surrender their newborns to emergency personnel — that opens into the registration and security station and alerts staff when it has been used.
Halstead said it is the second Safe Haven Baby Box in Pennsylvania. The other is in Lancaster, according to safehavenbabyboxes.com.
A retail pharmacy will have a drive-through and will also deliver medications to patients who are waiting to be discharged.
The medical office building will have family medicine, pediatrics and specialty care, such as pulmonology, ENT, orthopedics and eventually gastroenterology.
A walk-in clinic on the second floor will be open to patients of all ages for issues that do not rise to the level of emergency department care. It will be open initially 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, but hours will expand at a later date to 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
The building will house services for the Hahne Cancer Center, with a team of oncologists and multidisciplinary care. It will has 15 infusion bays and radiation services, including a new $4.5 million Varian TrueBeam, linear accelerator designed for precision delivery of radiation treatments without damaging healthy tissue.
“This unit delivers precisely targeted radiation within doses that are 40 to 140% higher than previous technology, making sessions shorter,” Abla said. “And the ability to deliver that beam focally spares other normal tissue around there providing less side effects and long-term issues for those patients.”
Dr. James Lieb, a State College native who previously worked at Mount Nittany Medical Center before joining Penn Highlands in 2022, will be the facilitiy’s on-site board-certified oncologist and will have three treatment rooms in the cancer center.
Other services will include women’s medical imaging — 3D mammography, ultrasound, DEXA and stereotactic breast biopsy — and gynecological services, as well as cardiology and a full clinical laboratory.
Patients will be able to register online and once they arrive at the hospital used biometric ID to check in with the palm of their hand.
“The hospital is very convenient for patients,” Abla said. “It’s designed to be easy to navigate, close to local amenities and other services.”
At opening, the hospital will have 133 staff members, but that number will eventually grow to about 240, Halstead said.
Penn Highlands State College is part of a health care building boom in Centre County.
Just down Waddle Road, Mount Nittany Health is expected to open its new $90 million, four-story outpatient medical center at Toftrees West in Patton Township this summer. Mount Nittany also recently opened its first walk-in clinic at the Hills Plaza in College Township, and a $350 million, 10-story patient tower addition at the medical center, with completion anticipated in late 2026.
Geisinger, meanwhile, is expected to complete construction on two Centre County facility projects by the end of 2024: $12 million expansion at its Healthplex State College, formerly known as Geisinger Gray’s Woods, and a $15.5 million primary care and urgent care facility in the Bellefonte area.
