St. Luke’s University Health Network will open a $252 million heart hospital at its Anderson Campus in October. Five stories deliver roughly 355,000 SF and 140 beds, along with four cardiac operating rooms, one hybrid operating room and 10 interventional suites. Construction began in 2024.
Cardiac surgery, catheterization and critical care will consolidate under a single roof at St. Luke’s University Health Network this October, when a $252 million heart hospital opens at the system’s Anderson Campus. By both cost and floor area, the network describes it as the largest project it has built in more than 150 years of operation.
Five stories carry approximately 355,000 SF and 140 beds, nearly doubling the campus. Central corridors on each upper floor run 330 feet, a dimension that shapes travel distances for staff and materials across the entire building. Construction began in 2024 using domestically sourced structural steel.
Procedural capacity anchors the program, with four operating rooms dedicated to heart cases, one hybrid operating room and ten interventional suites configured for cardiac catheterization, electrophysiology and interventional radiology. Hybrid rooms of that type pair fixed imaging with surgical sterility, allowing catheter based and open procedures to proceed in one space without transferring a patient. A dedicated cardiac intensive care unit absorbs the highest acuity portion of the caseload, supported by new imaging equipment, heart lung machines that maintain circulation during open heart surgery, and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation units for extended cardiopulmonary support.
According to the network, cost per SF landed below industry norms for a building of this complexity, a result it attributes to repetition across its construction portfolio. Five full service acute care hospitals have been delivered in recent years, which St. Luke’s says exceeds any other health system in the state.
Teaching space and a new cardiac fellowship program extend graduate medical education into the cardiovascular service line. Internal service corridors route staff to supply and support areas away from public circulation, while a rooftop helipad and an enlarged cafeteria serve the wider campus.
St. Luke’s announced the opening timeline. Anderson Campus occupies 500 acres above the Lehigh River in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, and opened in 2011 as the first full service acute care hospital built in the state in four decades, originally including a cancer center and medical office building. A $26 million Specialty Pavilion followed in 2017 with an ambulatory surgery center, and a $90 million Women and Babies Pavilion opened in 2020 with labor and delivery, a neonatal intensive care unit, graduate medical education space and a simulation teaching center. Also on the property are the St. Luke’s Rodale Institute Organic Farm and a network of public walking trails.