OHSU’s Next Marquam Hill Milestone Lands August 1 — Heart Care Space Opens in Kohler Pavilion
OHSU’s $650 million hospital expansion already delivered its highest-profile milestone this spring. The next one lands this month, with less fanfare but real significance for the project’s broader strategy.
Vista Pavilion — the 530,000-square-foot, 14-story cancer care tower connected to OHSU’s existing hospital by three skybridges — opened for patients on April 7, adding 128 inpatient beds dedicated to the Knight Cancer Institute. That opening was the headline moment of a five-year construction project that broke ground in January 2022, built by general contractor Skanska with NBBJ as architect.
What’s less widely known: Vista Pavilion’s opening was designed to function as a capacity “release valve” for the rest of the Marquam Hill campus. By consolidating cancer care into the new tower, OHSU freed up space in Kohler Pavilion — its existing 14-story, 146-bed facility — to expand other specialty services. That expansion reaches its next milestone on August 1, when new heart care space is scheduled to open in Kohler Pavilion, followed by new brain care space targeted for December 1. Combined, those two moves bring OHSU to a total of 72 beds for brain care and 60 beds for heart care once complete.
A separate emergency department expansion, adding 17 beds and creating separate adult and pediatric entrances, began construction in July 2025 and is targeted for completion in January 2028 — the final piece of the broader expansion project OHSU’s board first approved in 2021.
Why this matters for contractors: This is a live illustration of how a single large healthcare capital project creates a cascade of smaller, sequenced construction and buildout work over several years — useful context for subcontractors and suppliers positioning for work in later phases of major medical campus expansions elsewhere in the region.
Sources: OHSU News; OHSU Hospital Expansion Project public timeline; Healthcare Design Magazine
