The University of Vermont Medical Center has paused the construction of a $130 million outpatient surgery center due to budget constraints set by regulators. The center will provide expanded surgical capabilities to address the needs of an aging population in the region, with plans to continue the project once financial concerns are addressed.
Rendering courtesy of The University of Vermont Medical Center
Once the building project resumes and is completed, the outpatient surgical facility in South Burlington also will allow UVM Medical Center to shift all surgeries from its Fanny Allen operating rooms, which cannot be expanded or further updated.
The University of Vermont (UVM) Medical Center announced Oct. 4 that it would pause construction on a $130 million outpatient surgery center (OSC) in South Burlington, blaming the decision on recent orders from a healthcare regulator.
The nearly 94,000-sq.-ft. surgical center, planned for South Burlington's Tilley Drive, is slated to include six operating rooms with the possibility for more in the future.
The Green Mountain Care Board (GMCB), a key state regulator, signed off on the project this summer. Construction was then supposed to begin this fall, but UVM Medical Center said in a press release that that work will now be delayed until at least next year, meaning the OSC will not be open until 2027 at the earliest, VTDigger reported.
"This is not the step we wanted to take because we know this will delay our ability to reduce wait times for surgeries that patients desperately need," Stephen Leffler, UVM Medical Center's president and chief operating officer, said in the press release. "We will continue to assess the situation and proceed as soon as we are able."
Hospital officials said the decision was made to address recent orders from GMCB that decreased the medical center's 2025 budget from the amount it requested.
"We appreciate UVM's thoughtful approach and understanding of the healthcare affordability crisis the state is in," GMCB Chair Owen Foster said in a statement. "This pause will allow UVM to continue its focus on its fundamentals and operations, and I am optimistic they will be able to realize the surgery center at the right time."
Each year, Vermont's hospitals ask the board to sign off on projected revenue from patient care and the rates they will charge private insurers for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins every Oct. 1.
UVM Medical Center had sought the board's permission to increase its patient revenue by 9.3 percent and its commercial insurance rates by 5.7 percent for the 2025 fiscal year, but GMCB ultimately allowed it to increase patient revenue by only 3.5 percent.
When Completed, Vermont's New OSC Will Still Have Room to Grow
Plans call for the proposed OSC to expand the UVM Medical Center's surgical capacity by initially adding eight operating rooms, 12 prep rooms and 36 recovery spaces, which is to include eight extended-stay recovery rooms. The setting is designed to promote efficiency and better experiences for patients, families, surgeons and staff, and provide space to build additional operating rooms if needed in the future.
Building the exterior shell for these additional spaces at the same time as the initial facility construction will greatly reduce the impact to current operations when additional capacity is needed, hospital officials said, as well as permit interior construction regardless of the time of year and provide the added capacity at a lower total cost.
In addition to the eight operating rooms, pre- and post-operative, and extended recovery spaces, the OSC will include a Mako robot for orthopedic joint procedures, which Claude E. Nichols III, a UVM Medical Center orthopedic surgeon and chair of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation at the Larner College of Medicine, called a critical aspect in the advancement of joint care for older patients throughout the region.
"In orthopedics, a major change in the past several years has been the evolution of procedures that previously required a hospital stay to be performed as outpatient procedures in the appropriate patients," he explained. "As people live longer and remain more active later in life, procedures like joint replacements are a growing, critical need — and so is ensuring our patients return home as quickly and safely as possible."
Once the building project resumes and is completed, the outpatient surgical facility in South Burlington also will allow UVM Medical Center to shift all surgeries from its Fanny Allen operating rooms, which cannot be expanded or further updated.
The UVM hospital also expects the new facility to have the capacity to perform approximately 8,000 outpatient surgeries per year.
OSC Facility Designed to Serve Aging Population
When the proposed OSC was announced in February 2023, UVM Medical Center said it would help meet the need for surgical services for an aging and growing population in the hospital's service area.
At that time, Leffler said population forecasts showed that by 2030 the total population in the hospital's coverage area would experience a small amount of growth, but the number of people ages 65 and above was likely to expand by 30 to 60 percent.
"We already see that our patients face access challenges, and a growing and aging population only exacerbates those challenges," he explained. "We will need more capacity to meet the health care needs of the people we serve."
Leaders from both UVM Health Network and UVM Medical Center, the region's only tertiary care facility, which serves approximately 1 million people across Vermont and northern New York, called the project a key step in plans to address challenges around patient access and financial sustainability both at the hospital and across the Health Network.
Even before the pandemic, UVM Medical Center consistently operated at capacity and faced sustained access challenges. The issues beleaguering Vermont's largest health provider are expected to grow worse over time, according to the hospital's planning documents, which it said was "largely driven by Chittenden County's population not only rapidly growing but aging at the same time."
With this demographic change driving increased demand for outpatient surgical services, the UVM Medical Center expects its current surgical capacity to fall short of demand by nearly 4,300 cases — or about one year's worth of Fanny Allen surgeries — by 2030.
"These complex, in-demand procedures could be performed more quickly and efficiently in a modern, outpatient setting," said Leffler. "That transition will also free up additional capacity in UVM Medical Center's inpatient operating rooms.
"It's a move that supports both our patients and our skilled and dedicated care teams, but time is not on our side. We have an imperative to act now to ensure we can continue to effectively carry out our mission of caring for patients across our region."
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