Northwest Community Hospital gains approval for $175M cancer and neurological care center

Endeavor Health Northwest Community Hospital hopes to move forward with plans to build a new $175 million cancer and neuroscience center after a state board approved the project earlier this week.

The three-story, 104,000-square-foot facility would consolidate the Arlington Heights hospital’s outpatient cancer and neurological care. The building would be connected to the main hospital via a bridge.

It would be the latest entry into an ongoing race amid Chicago-area healthcare systems to beef up their cancer care amid rising demand.

In the area served by Northwest Community, the incidence of cancer is expected to grow by 12% between 2023 and 2028, according to the hospital’s application for the project, citing data from the Advisory Board. Thanks to medical advances, patients are also living longer with cancer, leading to more demand for outpatient cancer services, according to the application.

“This is going to allow us to create more capacity to meet the demand but also do it in a much more cohesive, coordinated way by bringing everything under one location so patients don't have to travel,” said David Rahija, president of the hospital. “They will have a much more seamless experience.”

The project will also allow Northwest Community to add more oncology specialists, he said. It should also give area patients more access to clinical trials, according to Endeavor.

The Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board unanimously voted to approve the project Tuesday.

The project now must get approval from the village of Arlington Heights. Mayor James Tinaglia recently wrote a letter to the state board expressing support for the project. In that letter, he wrote, “Currently, patients in our community face limited access to cancer subspecialty care and have significant travel times to seek treatment.”

Once it gains the necessary approvals, Endeavor hopes to begin construction later this year and finish the project by December 2029.

Endeavor, formerly called NorthShore University HealthSystem, acquired Northwest Community in 2021 and has made changes since then.

Last year, Endeavor announced that it was eliminating a 52-bed inpatient psychiatric unit at Northwest, citing decreased demand and an increased focus on outpatient and community-based care.

Earlier this year, Endeavor opened an outpatient behavioral health center in Palatine, expanding on services previously offered at the outpatient behavioral health center on the Northwest Community campus.

“The literature suggests that if you can go upstream and intervene earlier in a patient’s diagnosis, you can prevent the crisis from happening in the first place, so we’ve taken our resources and really invested in where the need and the demand is,” Rahija said.

Rahija said Northwest Community will remain a multidisciplinary hospital, serving the vast majority of health needs in the community, but Endeavor is also growing its outpatient offerings and trying to bring more experts into communities.

Endeavor has also been expanding its cancer care at Endeavor Health Swedish Hospital in Chicago and Endeavor Health Elmhurst Hospital.

Across the Chicago area, a number of major hospital systems are also spending hundreds of millions of dollars to boost cancer care to meet growing demand, including Northwestern Medicine, UChicago Medicine, Advocate Lutheran General Hospital and Rush University System for Health.