Rush plans 60,000-square-foot outpatient medical center on former Sears site

A former Sears site on the West Side will become a Rush University Medical Center for outpatient care, hospital officials announced Monday.

The 60,000-square-foot center will be just within the city limits, at North and Harlem avenues, where Chicago’s Galewood neighborhood abuts Elmwood Park, Oak Park and River Forest.

The $70 million center will have 90 exam rooms, providing services ranging from urgent and primary care to imaging and diagnostics. Construction is expected to begin in the fall, and the center is expected to open in January 2025.

Dr. Dino Rumoro, CEO of Rush Oak Park Hospital, said he’s been looking for a comprehensive outpatient center to complement the suburban hospital since becoming CEO in 2021.

“There’s more and more procedures that are done outpatient, so that you don’t need to build more hospital beds,” he said. “Health care has shifted to an outpatient setting.”

Sun-Times photo

The center will have its urgent care, radiology department and lab for drawing blood on the ground floor; the upper two stories will have rooms for nonurgent care that can be closed on weekends. It will have about 200 parking spaces.

Rumoro said the hospital system was drawn to the location because it’s near communities the hospital serves already and there isn’t a similar facility nearby.

“When we look at the map of health care in that area,” he said, “there’s not an all inclusive outpatient center like that.”

He said that Rush hasn’t decided on a name for the center and officials are awaiting state approval to break ground.

The development is the latest plan for the long-vacant site. It would sit on the end closer to Wabansia Avenue, one block north of North Avenue. The North Avenue side will have another development, which has not been announced.

The site sits in the 29th Ward, where Ald. Chris Taliaferro faces challenger CB Johnson in a runoff on April 4 for the majority-Black ward.

Michael Loria is a staff reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South Side and West Side.