UCHealth Highlands Ranch Hospital Expansion — Colorado

UCHealth has finished a five-story expansion that reshapes its Highlands Ranch Hospital south of Denver. The roughly $119 million project adds about 340,000 square feet of medical space, built by Layton Construction, and it answers a simple problem: a fast-growing suburb had outgrown the hospital serving it.

Project Scope

The centerpiece is a new five-story tower carrying a cancer center, additional emergency department capacity and expanded stroke and cardiac services. The work also included building out shell space on the top floor of the existing hospital and adding two new buildings, pushing the total well past 300,000 square feet across the campus. Layton logged more than 500,000 labor hours on the job, with roughly 250 workers across 16 trades on site at peak. Building next to and on top of a fully operating hospital is its own discipline, with infection-control barriers, vibration limits and phasing that keeps emergency and inpatient services running through every stage of construction.

Why It Matters

Highlands Ranch has added residents faster than its healthcare infrastructure could keep up, and cancer, stroke and cardiac care are exactly the services patients don’t want to drive across the metro to reach. Expanding on the existing campus rather than building a new hospital lets UCHealth add capacity where demand already sits, and phasing the work around live operations avoids sending patients elsewhere during construction. The tower’s opening gives the south-metro area a fuller-service hospital and takes pressure off UCHealth facilities that had been absorbing the overflow.

Project Team & Details