Essentia’s ‘Vision Northland’ Substantially Completed

DULUTH, MINN. — Vision Northland is the name of the Essentia project in downtown Duluth. It has been under construction since 2017 and is now essentially complete. Hospital executives gave a tour of the new St. Mary’s Medical Center, which cost about $900 million to build.

Walking through the new hospital Tuesday reminded some of those on the tour of a very nice, upscale hotel. The CEO of Essentia, Dr. David Herman, said the hospital is designed to allow everyone, patients, physicians, and staff members to feel or get better while they are at the hospital.

Herman said, “This isn’t coming to a place where you have to give up the outside. This is a place that was designed to bring the outside in, to help heal our patients, and to keep our colleagues refreshed and excited about the work that they do.”

The hospital hired 120 local artists who created the images that are throughout the hospital showing outdoor spaces.

This project has been a design-build, which allowed the hospital to make changes as the building went up. This was especially beneficial as hospital personnel learned what areas would likely need to change for future needs, especially in a future pandemic.

“One of the things we noticed during the pandemic is that ICU space, or intensive care unit space, and places for ventilators were really at a premium,” Herman said. “So when we built this building we built it initially in its design for 64 Intensive care unit beds. As we were building the building and could see that we would need we will be able to flex in up to 128 Intensive care unit beds if needed in another pandemic or another natural disaster.”

With the building substantially finished what is happening now is making sure that all the installed systems work and that everything passes Health Department inspections. There are 23 work teams that are now working on fine-tuning their plans on how to move everything, including patients, to the new St. Mary’s.

St. Mary’s says that the new hospital will open in the third quarter and equipment will move from old to new over the course of a week and a half. Patients will be moved on a Sunday.

“Our patients will have breakfast at the old St. Mary’s Medical Center and then move over here and have lunch at the new St. Mary’s Medical Center,” Herman said.

The new hospital will have the same number of patient rooms, but they will be larger. The surgical suites will also be larger. Herman says the new hospital is 240 thousand square feet smaller than the current one. He says that’s due to design work that meets today’s needs as well as future needs.