First look: Inside the new Texas Children's Hospital in Austin opening in February

Texas Children's Hospital's Austin hospital is almost open. On Thursday, it held a ribbon-cutting ceremony, giving a first look at the $485 million, 365,000-square-foot hospital at 9835 N. Lake Creek Parkway in Northwest Austin near U.S. 183 and Texas 45.

The official opening will be Feb. 20, although its Texas Children's Pediatrics clinic connected to the hospital is opening Monday.

The Austin hospital is Texas Children's first hospital outside the Houston area. More growth is on the way, including a South Austin hospital at Interstate 35 and Puryear Road in coming years, said CEO Mark A. Wallace. The decision to enter the Austin market came after looking at Austin’s growth trends and the number of Central Texas patients traveling to Texas Children’s in Houston for care, he said.

“It has been a longtime goal of mine to continue the incredible mission of our founders and expand access to Texas Children’s high-quality level of care to families throughout Texas,” Wallace said. “As we celebrate our 70th anniversary as an organization, we are looking forward to serving even more children and women with one of the most elite clinical teams in the world.”

The hospital system arrived in Austin in 2018 and now has 21 pediatric, specialty and urgent care clinics in the area. It opened its women's pavilion down the street from the hospital in December.

The hospital will bring many of its specialists to Austin as well as the ability to consult with experts in its Houston headquarters.

"There's a reason that Texas Children's has been the No. 1 children's hospital in Texas and the No. 3 children's hospital in the country: a depth of service and a depth of expertise," said Russ Williams, the senior vice president for Texas Children's Hospital in Austin. For patients at the new hospital in Austin, "I think they're going to get the best experience they've ever had in health care."

It is the fourth children's hospital to open in Austin. Dell Children's Medical Center in East Austin opened in 2007 after it outgrew the Austin Children's Hospital space. St. David's North Austin Medical Center opened its children's hospital in 2014 near Parmer Lane and MoPac Boulevard. Dell Children's opened its second location in April 2023 about a mile north of the Texas Children's Hospital location.

Expanding care: What's behind the growth in Central Texas health care? Here's what you need to know.

Will patients be able to stay in Austin?

One of the early critiques of Texas Children's building a hospital in Austin was that this hospital would still send its patients to Houston for specialty services.

That will happen only in incredibly rare cases, Williams said. Right now, those cases include organ transplants, if families go through Texas Children's instead of Dell Children's, and some rare cancers or other rare diseases, he said. Some of those specialties, including organ transplants, might be added to the Austin hospital in the future, he said.

"We will be able to offer almost anything anyone in Central Texas needs right here on this campus," Williams said. "The whole point we're here is to keep women and children here in Central Texas."

What's inside the new Texas Children's Hospital?

• 52 patient beds.

• 13-room emergency department that will seek Level II designation (the second highest level) with two trauma rooms, two rooms that convert to behavioral health rooms by closing off all instrument panels for safety, one isolation room for infectious diseases and one sexual assault diagnostic room.

• 11 urgent care rooms.

• 12 rooms including eight private rooms and one bay with four rooms with space to keep up to quadruplets in the same room in its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. It has space to expand to another 12 rooms. The unit will seek Level IV designation (the highest level).

• 10 intensive care unit beds with room for another 14.

• Seven operating rooms, five for pediatrics and two for women's services, with space to expand to another three operating rooms.

• One catherization/interventional radiology room.

• Two procedure rooms.

• Labor delivery recovery postpartum rooms in which a mom stays in one room before, during and after labor, and dedicated parking for expecting parents.

• Three sleep study rooms and three epilepsy monitoring rooms, with space to add another three sleep study rooms.

• Physical, speech and occupational therapy spaces.

• Blood bank and milk bank.

• 1,100 staff including physicians.

Built with colorful, playful touches

Each floor has a different biosystem theme, from grasslands to caverns to lakes. The animals that go with that floor's theme are carved into the wood in the nurses stations and information desks. These animal carvings are also found in the elevators. Tiles in the floor also have local animal shapes from bats to turtles to raccoons.

Local children's artwork hangs throughout the hospital, from dinosaurs to Lego men. Murals by local artists depict Austin-area scenes in art, both paintings and mosaics.

Each floor is also a different color, helping you remember where you are.

Built for parents and families

Each floor has a break area with coffee, water and ice machines as well as sitting areas and phone charging stations with a variety of charging cords.

Each room, including the NICU rooms, has a pullout couch that makes a double bed. In the NICU rooms, a mom who just gave birth can stay in the room with her baby.

There also will be walking trails once the construction is complete. The hospital has a café and a cafeteria.

The pharmacy next to urgent care and the emergency room will be staffed around the clock to fill prescriptions before patients leave.

Built for expediency

Texas Children's emergency department is next door to its urgent care. If families come into the urgent care but need a higher level of care, they can just walk to the next department, or if they come into the ER and don't need that level of care, they can walk to the urgent care.

The emergency department is also next to the imaging areas for MRIs and CT scans, making that process go faster.

Texas Children's is opening with its own microbiology lab, allowing all the testing to be done there.

Built with infectious diseases in mind

Each floor has a corner room that can serve as an isolation room with an outer area for staffers to put on protective equipment before entering that room. Those rooms can be switched into negative pressure or positive pressure air flows. Positive pressure keeps medically vulnerable patients from getting outside air in. Negative pressure keeps the air in the room from flowing out to other patients in case of a patient with a highly contagious disease.

It also has a sterile process center with contaminated and sterile sides that are kept separate, including the workers to avoid cross-contamination.

Built for growth

The hospital is opening with 52 beds and has space to add 48 beds throughout the tower, including a shelled in but unfinished fifth floor. A second future tower could add 100 beds, similar to the current size of Dell Children's main campus.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas Children's Hospital Austin opens this month. Take a look inside