The medical office building on Louisiana Highway 21/South Tyler Street is climbing skyward as construction of the facility progresses.

Part of St. Tammany Parish Hospital, the 60,000-square-foot building is three-stories high and costs $10 million. The facility will contain physician offices and ancillary hospital services located near the main campus of the hospital.

Patti Ellish, president and CEO of the hospital, said, “We view this project as an opportunity to create physician office space connected to our main campus. We know that easy access to the care we deliver here is vital to the health and wellbeing of Northshore patients, and we believe offering the state-of-the-art medical office building, connected to the hospital, will make that a reality.”

Shown is the site of the future St. Tammany Parish Hospital medical complex, which will be 60,000 square feet and three stories high. The completion date for the complex is set for Dec. 31.

The completion date for the project is Dec. 31. Plans include an elevated walkway across Tyler Street, connecting the facility to the hospital. This will provide convenient access for doctors and patients to the main campus and to doctor’s offices.

To construct the new facility, the St. Tammany Parish Hospital Heart Center was demolished in January. The foundation of the older builder, built in 1994, would not support a larger structure. It was a wooden frame structure with load bearing walls, not a steel post and beam structure. Horizontal expansion of the building would have taken too much space to allow for adequate parking.

Offices and facilities located in the older building were relocated. The cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation units and the pacemaker and coumadin blood thinner clinics were moved to the Tchefuncte Medical Offices building, 1323 S. Tyler St. at that time.

The St. Tammany Heart and Vascular Institute, LLC, and the offices of Dr. Farhad X. Aduli, Dr. Hamid Salam and Dr. Adriana Nagy relocated to the Tchefuncte Medical Offices building.

Other physician offices relocated to 180 Greenbrier in Covington, including the Venous and Arterial Surgery Clinic; Dr. Philip A. Gardner, FACS, RVT; and Dr. George E. Barnes, FACS.

The new building will accommodate the growth and increased demands for quality health care facilities in the parish, according to hospital spokesperson Melissa Hodgson.