Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) had a busy news day yesterday, releasing renderings for its 19-story Medical Center expansion and announcing development in its West Campus. Meanwhile, we (and 350 of our friends) got face time with SVP of facilities Pete Dawson at Bisnow’s Healthcare Real Estate Summit yesterday morning.

The Affordable Care Act is still evolving, Pete says, and systems haven’t seen the full impact yet. All the same, they’re growing to meet their mission and get services out into the community. That’s challenging within the Texas Medical Center, where expanding requires going vertical or redeveloping a property. (It’s like building a ship in a bottle while riding a roller coaster, he joked.) We snapped Pete with Balfour Beatty’s Marc Scott and Browne MacGregor’s Charles Browne yesterday.

FKP shared this rendering of TCH’s vertical development on its Main Campus. It’s adding 19 stories (640k SF and initially 129 beds) to its existing patient tower adjacent to the Pavilion for Women. The tower will be the tallest TCH facility to date. Pete says the new space will be dedicated to intensive care and includes a focus on cardiovascular problems—the Heart Center will move out of the West Tower and into the new space (dubbed Pediatric Tower E). This $506M project wraps up in 2018 and is the bulk of a $575M capital investment TCH is making into its Main Campus. FKP is leading planning and design; it also handled the Main Campus, the Pavilion for Women and the campus under construction in The Woodlands.

TCH is also planning a $50M expansion at its West Campus, building out the majority of its remaining shell space. It’s doubling operating rooms (from four to eight), adding 24 inpatient beds, building a dedicated interventional radiology suite, adding 18 beds on the fifth floor (which contains the specialized isolation unit TCH is building for highly contagious infectious diseases), and converting office space into clinical space, the Houston Business Journal reports. The fifth floor construction (designed by Page and built by Tellepsen) will complete on Oct. 1, and the rest of the development will take place over the next two and a half years. When it’s done, only 2% of TCH’s West Campus will remain shell space, down from 20% now, according to the HBJ. [HBJ]