Boca Raton Regional Hospital's new eight-story patient tower is roughly 90% complete and could begin admitting patients by the end of October, a milestone that would make the hospital the largest in Palm Beach County. The 427,000-square-foot Gloria Drummond Patient Tower adds 216 private patient rooms and 20 operating rooms to the hospital's campus at 800 Meadows Road, about a mile south of Florida Atlantic University.
According to the Miami Herald, the hospital has a final life-safety survey scheduled for Tuesday, October 13, with services expected to move into the building in phases afterward. Haroula Protopapadakis Norden said the hospital expects to begin moving patients into the tower by the end of October, though she added there is no exact opening date yet. The project, designed by HKS and built by Robins & Morton, cost between $700 million and $750 million, per Norden.
Hospital leaders and supporters cut the ribbon on the tower on October 2, with Boca Raton Regional Hospital chief executive Lincoln Mendez and Baptist Health South Florida president and CEO Bo Boulenger among those marking the occasion, alongside Baptist Health benefactor Christine Lynn, the Herald reported. Baptist Health South Florida is Boca Raton Regional Hospital's parent company, a relationship that dates to the hospital's merger with the 11-hospital nonprofit system, completed on July 1, 2019, following a two-year evaluation of potential partners, according to Becker's Hospital Review.
A Tower Built for Specialized Care
Inside, the tower houses a 16-bed Cardiac Intensive Care Unit and expanded clinical space for the Marcus Neuroscience Institute, according to The Boca Raton Tribune. One operating suite includes an MRI machine mounted on tracks that can scan a patient's brain mid-surgery, and the tower also features a hybrid operating suite for open and minimally invasive procedures using live X-ray imaging, per the Herald's reporting.
Patient rooms come with private bathrooms and showers, 42-inch televisions, and digital whiteboards listing each patient's care team and treatment plan. Nurses will be able to chart directly inside patient rooms, and the building uses switchable privacy glass in doors and observation windows. Each patient floor has a sunroom at both ends, and touch-screen kiosks throughout the building will give visitors directions along with QR-code routes sent straight to their phones.
The tower also includes a bistro, an interfaith chapel, and a Shabbat room, rounding out amenities meant to serve patients and families during long hospital stays. Still, Norden noted that primary-care physicians remain the hospital's greatest staffing need as it prepares to expand.
From a 1962 Tragedy to the County's Largest Hospital
The tower's name honors Gloria Drummond, who lost two young children to accidental poisoning in 1962, a year when Boca Raton had no hospital of its own. At the time, the nearest emergency facility was Bethesda Memorial Hospital in Boynton Beach, roughly 15 miles away, according to The Coastal Star, when the city had only about 10,000 residents. Drummond and other women raised the money to build Boca Raton's original hospital, and the hospital credits 18 women with willing that facility into existence, per the Herald.
That original four-story Boca Raton Community Hospital opened on July 17, 1967, on land donated by Gloria Drummond and her husband Robert, according to the Glick Family Funeral Home. Nearly six decades later, the campus has grown into a very different kind of institution, serving as a teaching site for Florida Atlantic University's Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, which hosts accredited residency programs there in internal medicine, general surgery, and neurology.
Largest Hospital in the County, in Phases
Once work on the older tower is complete, the full campus will have 561 licensed beds, surpassing Delray Medical Center's 536 beds and St. Mary's Medical Center in West Palm Beach, which has 413 acute care beds. The older tower will be converted to general medical beds but will retain a neurological ICU connected to the Marcus Neuroscience Institute, which is also where Hoodline reported on a Highland Beach man's brain aneurysm procedure last month. The hospital's specialties include cancer, cardiac care, neuroscience, and orthopedics.
The expansion also reflects years of community fundraising. The Boca Raton Regional Hospital Foundation's Keeping the Promise capital campaign launched in January 2019 with a $250 million goal and ultimately brought in roughly $400 million in donations, far exceeding its original target. Major gifts behind the campus transformation included more than $75 million from the Marcus Foundation and a $25 million gift from Toby and Leon Cooperman toward the Medical Arts Pavilion, according to a hospital profile from Altss.
The growth comes as Boca Raton's population continues to age. Roughly 24.6% of the city's estimated 100,234 residents are 65 or older, a trend Hoodline detailed in a recent report on local senior care. That demand for advanced cardiac, neurological, and surgical capacity underpins the case for a tower that, once fully operational, is expected to put Boca Raton Regional Hospital atop the county's hospital rankings.
