Centre Co., PA (WJAC) — Officials with Mounty Nittany Health System announced that its board has approved the addition of a new, 10-floor patient tower at the Mount Nittany Medical Center.

Health officials say the 300,000 square foot expansion will include the addition of 168 private patient rooms, as well as outpatient clinics, registration areas and outdoor space for patients and visitors.

"The new tower is a big, game-changing step to improve the environment for patients and staff," said Kathleen Rhine, president and CEO of Mount Nittany Health, in a statement. "By investing in the new tower, we are creating a better environment for the medical staff and nursing professionals caring for our community members, and enhancing the inpatient experience with spacious private rooms, a therapeutic environment, convenient access to inpatient care services, and advanced technology."

Design development for the project began this past August. And now that the board has approved the tower's development, construction is expected to begin next summer.

"I mean, to be able to go to a hundred percent private rooms, really improve dining, improve some outpatient services... It'll be a whole new experience, walking in," Tiffany Cabibbo, the executive vice president of patient care services and chief nursing officer, told 6 News on Friday.

That's a point the Mount Nittany staff kept repeating: the 168 new private rooms.

"So, we're able to...enlarge the rooms, have more adequate patient family space where, you know, your loved one could stay with you overnight and you're not kind of crunched into a room or a semi-private room," Cabibbo explained. "And then really trying to embrace and create that therapeutic environment, bringing these beautiful views that we have here right on our campus."

Though, they will keep the same amount of beds at the center. Cabibbo told us that will open up some space in the current facilities.

"So, we have a current bed licensure. It's 260 bed license, so we maintain that," she said. "So, it's really how we're gonna operationalize it with the new tower."

"I think especially since the pandemic, it's become more challenging to have semi-private rooms and utilize our bed compliments," Cabibbo observed. "So, this, again, will create better flexibility going into the future."

Dr. Upendra Thaker, the center's chief medical officer, told 6 News that they "get a lot of people from surrounding counties that come to us for the healthcare. And having a facility that is state-of-the-art and an environment that's much more user-friendly, I think makes a big difference."

But what prompts a health system to build a ten-story tower in Central Pennsylvania? They say: it's aging infrastructure.

"Parts of our hospital were built in the 70s," the center's chief of staff, Dr. Thomas Covaleski, told 6 News. "So, it's like comparing a 1970s house to a brand-new house."

"We're gonna upgrade a lot of our technology," he explained. "We're gonna upgrade our capabilities so that patients aren't needing to be shuffled around to different levels of care. We're gonna be able to care for people in the same place through their different levels of illness. So, it's gonna be beneficial for us and beneficial for the patients too."

"It's a bed tower, so, of course, we talk about those patient beds, but it's a whole new dining and servery," said Cabibbo. "There's enhancements to the support space for our physicians and the rest of our care team members, and really again, uh, incorporating green spaces and reflective type spaces around."

"We are a community hospital, right? We don't have stockholders," said Thaker. "Our stockholders are the average guy in the street, right? So for us, anything we can do to, to not only enhance the services, but to provide the service in a way that looks like, you know, close to home, close to our culture. I think it's a big deal."

However, keeping up with the times requires long-term planning, such as this.

"There's a lot of healthcare change that occurred over those 50 years," said Covaleski. "We're designing this for the next 50 years."

The architecture firm behind the tower is Stantec, who's working with the firm Whiting Turner. The tower is expected to be completed and occupied by December 2026.

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