Kansas City, Mo. ? When St. Luke’s Hospital renovated 14 neurology intensive care rooms, officials included a feature that is becoming a standard in the health care industry.

Each room comes with a ceiling-mounted patient lift system that can handle up to 600 pounds, a $6,000-per-room expense hospital officials said was far from an extravagance.

“When you have a patient who comes in who is of larger size it’s a safety issue of having the lift rather than have five or six nurses at the bedside trying to do that,” said Jennifer Ball, director of patient care for medical/surgical. “I think we’re seeing more (obese patients) and people are more conscientious about it.”

Nationwide, the $3 billion market for hospital beds, wheelchairs and other equipment designed for plus-size patients is booming, a welcome development for the growing number of companies that cater to the health care industry.

Kinetic Concepts Inc., of San Antonio, for example, said its line of beds and accessories for obese patients took in $282 million last year, a 6 percent increase from the year before.

“There’s more and more and more of these patients showing up at hospitals now,” said Ron Dziedziula, director of marketing for KCI’s therapeutic surfaces division.

SIZEWise Rentals, of Las Vegas, another market leader, declined to discuss financial numbers but said it has seen growth of between 15 percent and 20 percent per year and its work force has grown from 23 two years ago to 125 now.

“There’s always something on TV,” said COO Trever Frickey, whose company was one of the first to market complete suites of equipment to hospitals. “Everywhere there’s this awareness of obesity.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimate that 65 percent of American adults are overweight and 31 percent are obese.

Overweight people tend to have more health problems but they often can’t fit in standard beds or wheelchairs built for 300-pound people.

DuWayne Kramer, president of Burke Mobility Products, sits in a bed designed for people weighing up to 1,000 pounds, which his company builds at its Kansas City, Kan., manufacturing plant. Kramer, who was pictured Aug. 6, said business was booming.

Instead, health care providers are calling companies such as KCI and SIZEWise for beds built to support up to 1,000 pounds and wheelchairs that are 32 inches or wider.

The equipment is not cheap, often costing much more than its regular counterparts. A typical hospital bed can cost $2,000, but a reinforced bed for heavier patients can cost $6,000 or more.

“Everything has to be custom,” said DuWayne Kramer, president of Kansas City, Kan.-based Burke Mobility Products, a key manufacturer. “You can’t use the same foam. It becomes more and more custom the heavier the person gets. You have to be thinking in a different way for everything.”

Kramer said he remembered when severely overweight patients first began appearing in hospitals, forcing staff to improvise.

“In years past, people were welding beds together or putting beds on the floor,” he said. “When we first got into this (in 1979), there was nothing out there.”

The equipment can be a blessing for hospital staff, who have the third-highest rate of injuries or illnesses among industries with 100,000 or more reported cases, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Many of those injuries come from moving patients, an activity made more dangerous when the patient is obese.