Although Penn Medicine Radnor, which opened in 2020 in suburban Philadelphia, is strictly an ambulatory care center, it belongs to an august medical family tree. It is descended from Pennsylvania Hospital, the first such institution in this country, founded by Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond in Philadelphia, in 1751. Through a merger between the original hospital and the University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) in 1997, it now is connected to more than a dozen health-care facilities of varying specialties in the Philadelphia area.
UPHS’s decision to build a large, 250,000-square-foot structure—to serve 1,500 outpatients a day—in Radnor township was simple. “We wanted to provide as much care as possible close to home,” says Tracey Commack, the hospital’s associate executive director. The array of services ranges from endoscopy, radiation and oncology, audiology, ophthalmology, neurosciences, and dermatology to a heart and vascular center. Designed by Ballinger, architects and engineers based in Philadelphia, the center is unlike most centralized hospitals because it is part of a mixed-use development, next to a high-speed intercity railway, that will eventually include an office building (also designed by Ballinger) and a hotel (architect to be determined). UPHS purchased the 22.6-acre site in 2015, but, since the parcel was larger than needed for its medical program, UPHS, with Ballinger as the master planners, sought a mixed-use zoning to amend the pharmaceutical lab-and-office one that previously existed when Wyeth Ayerst Pharmaceuticals company, by then defunct, occupied the site. Brandywine Realty Trust is the developer of the two nonmedical components.
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