Becker's Hospital Review: 'I don't think bigger is better': Children's Mercy CEO on a $1B bet and the right time to scale
By Kelly Gooch
When Alejandro Quiroga, MD, describes the more than $1 billion acute care tower Children’s Mercy is building in Kansas City, Mo., he frames it less as an expansion than a necessity.
The tower, planned for the system’s flagship Adele Hall campus downtown, will expand total capacity by 25% to 30%, with a new home for the pediatric and neonatal intensive care units, an expanded emergency department and a surgical center built for robotics. Enabling work is expected to begin this fall, with completion targeted for 2031. It comes amid a wave of large capital projects across health systems, with Children’s Mercy among 14 health system projects worth $500 million or more in 2026. Third-party assessments by Deloitte and HDR found that within five years, the system’s existing footprint would meet only 67% of projected bed needs and 40% of projected NICU demand, according to a health system news release.
The math made the decision easy to validate for Dr. Quiroga, president and CEO of Children’s Mercy.
“When we analyze where we’re going to be five years from today, if we don’t expand our capacity, we will not be able to fulfill the needs of our community and the growth that comes with that,” he told Becker’s. “Even when I was interviewing for this role, it was easy to see: from the financials, from our position, from talking to the team. And once I got into the role, it was fairly easy to validate those assumptions.”
Read the full article via Becker's Hospital Review