UChicago Medicine’s new Crown Point multispecialty care facility opens April 29

Following 20 months of construction and hundreds of hours of planning, the University of Chicago Medicine is scheduled to open its two-story, 130,000-square-foot multispecialty care center in Northwest Indiana to patients on April 29, 2024.

The facility — called UChicago Medicine Crown Point and located at I-65 and 109th Avenue — will offer advanced specialty care, including pediatric care from UChicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital experts, in the following areas:

• For all ages: cancer, digestive diseases, heart and vascular care, and neurosciences
• For adults: obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN), pain management and transplant
• For children: allergy and immunology, endocrinology, general surgery, infectious diseases, orthopaedic surgery, otolaryngology (ENT), plastic surgery, pulmonary medicine and rheumatology

Patients can call 219-407-5500 to make an appointment beginning March 25.

“We’re excited to bring the forefront of medicine to people in Northwest Indiana who would otherwise have to travel long distances to access highly specialized care,” said Blase Polite, MD, Physician-in-Chief for Northwest Indiana. “We look forward to joining the community and collaborating with local providers who have patients that can benefit from our services.”

The Crown Point facility is poised to meet a core need: Based on an assessment of the market, UChicago Medicine found that about 15% of patients in Northwest Indiana travel outside the region for medical care, with roughly 1 in 5 of that group visiting the health system’s facilities in and around Chicago.

“We see this as an opportunity to establish a strong partnership with the local health system and to serve area residents, many of whom have been UChicago Medicine patients for years,” Polite said.

Adult and pediatric specialty services in Northwest Indiana

The care center, at 10855 Virginia Street in Crown Point, is UChicago Medicine’s first freestanding facility in Indiana and its largest offsite location. The facility will employ about 200 clinical and nonclinical staff and is projected to accommodate 110,000 patient visits each year.

UChicago Medicine Crown Point will offer a range of adult and pediatric specialty services that include:

• Infusion therapy, radiation and medical and surgical oncology for cancer patients
• MRI, CT, PET, X-ray and ultrasound imaging capabilities, and a breast imaging center
• An ambulatory surgery center (ASC)
• Laboratory services
• Access to the next generation of advanced treatments through UChicago Medicine clinical trials
• An eight-bed emergency department and eight-bed inpatient unit

To prepare for the site launch, UChicago Medicine teams have spent many hours working on floor plans, technology installation, equipment tracking, air testing, building security and other logistics.

Crown Point staff and providers will hold two weeklong “day in the life” training sessions on March 4 and April 2, respectively, to function as dress rehearsals that can identify potential operational, technical or logistical issues before any patients arrive.

Increasing access to UChicago Medicine’s care

UChicago Medicine Crown Point builds on a network of smaller specialty care medical offices UChicago Medicine has been operating for years in the region in Merrillville, Munster and Schererville.

Last September, UChicago Medicine also acquired four regional oncology centers from Michiana Hematology Oncology. An existing location in Crown Point is being moved into the new Crown Point facility (patients who received care at these locations will continue to be treated by their doctors and clinicians).

UChicago Medicine Cancer Care Center at Chesterton and UChicago Medicine Cancer Care Center at Valparaiso will remain at their current locations.

UChicago Medicine is also building a 575,000-square-foot first-of-kind standalone cancer care and research facility on Chicago's South Side. With a planned opening in 2027, it will eventually handle 200,000 outpatient visits and 5,000 inpatient admissions every year.