page_title: Rush University Medical Center
section_title: Rush Transformation
hierarchical_section_title: Rush University Medical Center / Rush Transformation
caption_attribution_description: English: View of the south side of Rush University Medical Center Tower, looking east. Chicago skyline in background.
context_page_description: Rush University Medical Center is a nationally ranked academic medical center located in the Illinois Medical District neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship location for the larger Rush University System for Health and serves as the primary teaching hospital in affiliation with Rush University.
  Rush University Medical Center provides 664 patient beds at its 14-story, 830,000 square foot location on Chicago's Near West Side. The campus is known for its butterfly-shaped design both architecturally and strategically as its post-9/11 layout was intended to handle mass casualties. Rush offers more than 70 residency and fellowship programs in medical and surgical specialties and subspecialties. Rush is also the largest non-governmental employer on Chicago's Near West Side with nearly 10,000 employees and annual spending of over $550 million.
  In 2020, U.S. News and World Report ranked Rush University Medical Center the #2 hospital in both Chicago and Illinois and #17 nationally. In the same report, Rush ranked nationally in 11 adult specialties including #4 in Neurology & Neurosurgery and #5 in Orthopedics.
context_section_description: Today, Rush is a center for basic and clinical research, with physicians and scientists involved in hundreds of research projects developing and testing the effectiveness and safety of new therapies and medical devices. The Robert H. Cohn and Terri Cohn Research Building is a state-of-the-art facility where investigators are conducting research to identify the causes of a wide range of diseases. Rush is investing over a billion dollars in the Rush Transformation, a comprehensive construction and renovation program that includes a 14-story inpatient care facility and advanced emergency response center (opened in 2012), a five-story ambulatory orthopedic building that opened in 2009, a seven-story parking garage, a central energy plant, an underground loading dock, and renovations to existing buildings.
  
  The new 806,000-square-foot (74,900 m²) East Tower hospital building would provide Rush with its first major new hospital facility in more than 25 years. The 14-level patient care tower houses acute and critical care patients, as well as surgical, diagnostic and therapeutic services utilizing the most advanced technology available. The new hospital would include expanded emergency services facilities including the Center for Advanced Emergency Response, a unique facility that would bring an unprecedented level of preparedness to Chicago and the region in the event of immediate and widespread emergencies such as pandemics or bioterrorism. The center is designed to have 40 exam rooms with “surge” capacity to treat additional patients in times of disaster. It is located on the ground floor of the new tower. 
  The new facility incorporates a concept called "interventional platform," a design model developed in recent years for centers like Rush that increasingly involve multiple medical specialists to treat patients with highly complex illnesses using the most advanced technologies available. Two other academic medical centers constructing new inpatient facilities, UCLA Medical Center (Los Angeles) and Johns Hopkins Hospital Center (Baltimore), have or are incorporating the interventional platform concept into their new hospital buildings. The interventional platforms at Rush cover three floors devoting to surgery, imaging and specialty procedures. This includes new, larger operating rooms that can accommodate more specialized equipment and technology, including imaging equipment and robotics. Nearby, the facilities for interventional radiology, cardiology and neurosurgery, fostering more extensive collaboration between various medical disciplines. Locating these key services close to one another minimizes the need for patients and their families to travel to multiple locations in the medical center.
  The top five floors of the east tower houses Rush's acute and critical patients, with each floor divided in half with two equal sections – or units – on either side. The 10th and 11th floors houses the hospital's adult critical care units, each floor having two 28-bed units. The remaining three floors are dedicated to acute care medical/surgical patients with two 32-bed areas on each level.
  The design of the acute and critical care tower was created by doctors and nurses whose ideas about universal room design, standardization, efficiency and safety influenced the layout. They considered sight lines to rooms from the nursing station and the number of steps required to reach each room. Nursing stations are at the central core, allowing hospital staff to see into all the wings from one location.  All patient rooms are standardized as either a medical surgical room or a critical care room, so that when caregivers enter any room in the new tower, they can able to quickly access supplies and equipment.
  All patient rooms are private and offer family accommodations, such as daybeds for visitors. There are 376 beds in the new facility, and Rush will have a total of 720 beds in operation at the completion of the Transformation project.
caption: RUMC Tower south view, Chicago to the east in background
exif: {"Image Make": "Research In Motion", "Image Model": "BlackBerry 9930", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Rim Exif Version1.00a", "Image DateTime": "2012:01:04 13:24:18", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "240", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[50, 50, 48, 48]", "GPS GPSLatitudeRef": "N", "GPS GPSLatitude": "[41, 6557/125, 0]", "GPS GPSLongitudeRef": "W", "GPS GPSLongitude": "[87, 8021/200, 0]", "GPS GPSAltitudeRef": "0", "GPS GPSAltitude": "284", "GPS GPSSpeedRef": "K", "GPS GPSSpeed": "0", "Image GPSInfo": "414", "EXIF ExposureTime": "0", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2012:01:04 13:24:18", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF SubjectDistance": "0", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "No flash function", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2560", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1920", "EXIF DeviceSettingDescription": "[]"}