BUILDING BINGE: Growth-minded Atrium Health is stoking the construction market with $2.2 billion in Charlotte area and Triad expansions.

• Author: Ellis, Kevin

Atrium Health is in the midst of a capital investment explosion that is unprecedented in the history of North Carolina's hospital industry.

The Charlotte-based health care system has committed $2.2 billion to projects in the Charlotte and Winston-Salem areas over the past few years. The not-for-profit authority is working on four major projects simultaneously.

* $900 million for a 12-story, 448-bed hospital tower at its Carolinas Medical Center campus in Charlotte's Dilworth neighborhood. By 2027, the 1.1 million-square-foot building is expected to add a net 191 beds. The existing center now has 868 beds licensed by the state.

* $425 million for the new medical school building, less than a mile from the new hospital tower. Atrium and Wake Forest School of Medicine are building the roughly 300,000 square foot Howard R. Levine Center for Education and a 331,000 square-foot research building tower that will be the centerpiece of the 20-acre, $1.5 billion "Pearl" innovation district. Other announced tenants include Wake Forest University School of Business, Wake Forest School for Professional Studies and Carolinas College of Health Sciences.

* $450 million for an eight-story tower at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center campus in Winston-Salem, slated to be completed in 2024. It's the first major investment in the Triad since Wake Forest Baptist joined Atrium in a 2020 combination.

* $228 million for the 30-bed Atrium Health Lake Norman, in Cornelius in north Mecklenburg County. Atrium broke ground on the project in May. The hospital is expected to employ 280 when it opens in 2025.

Those projects follow two other major Atrium projects to open in the past two years:

* The reported $100 million David L. Conlan Center at Atrium Health's Carolina Medical Center, which opened in January on the site of the former rehabilitation center and a parking lot. It's named after Conlan, a business partner of Charlotte real estate developer Howard "Smoky" Bissell and his wife, Margaret, who donated $30 million for the project. Bissell sold Ballantyne Corporate Park to Northwood Investors for more than $1 billion in 2017.

* The $150 million-plus Atrium Health Union West, a 40-bed site that opened in February 2022, marking the first Atrium hospital to open in more than 30 years. It is serving fast-growing parts of east Mecklenburg and west Union counties.

Atrium, the state's largest private employers, is spreading the work among various contractors. Redwood...