Kaiser Building State-of-the-Art Multi-Specialty Facility in Lansdowne

Kaiser Permanente is building a state-of-the-art multi-specialty facility in Lansdowne that the company says will redefine medical care delivery in the region.

Kaiser's South Baltimore County Medical Center, the four-story, 130,000-square-foot building under construction on the 1700-block of Twin Springs Road, will include primary care, urgent care, ambulatory surgery, advanced diagnostic imaging, pharmacy and a variety of specialty services.

"It includes virtually all of the specialties we provide at Kaiser Permanente," said Dr. Michael Dias, physician in chief, Baltimore area, Mid-Atlantic Permanente Group. "It's a very high-functioning facility."

When operational in the spring of 2013, the facility will provide services to about 62,000 Kaiser members in the Baltimore metropolitan area, according to Kathryn Brown, Kaiser's Baltimore-area administrator.

The Lansdowne facility is one of four Kaiser is building to serve about 500,000 members in the mid-Atlantic region, and the only one in the Baltimore area.

Other facilities will be operational in Montgomery County, Fairfax County, VA, and Washington, D.C.

South Baltimore Medical Center will have advanced radiology services, such as MRI, and two operating rooms for same-day surgery.

Dias said that one of the innovative features of the new facility is a 14-bed "clinical decision unit" where patients can be held for observation for up to 24 hours.

"The wait in emergency rooms is among the most expensive care there is," he said.

In Kaiser's clinical decision unit, patients can avoid emergency room visits for evaluation of possible heart attack or stroke, or for brief therapy such as IV antibiotics or drugs to treat asthma.

""It's really about delivering the right level of care in the right location," Dias said. "By providing these services, we can provide much better care to our patients."