A rendering shows Kansas University Hospital’s new Addition, which is scheduled to open in 2011. The 183,000-square-foot building will provide centralized office space for 211 physicians and 219 residents from Kansas University Medical Center. Doctor’s offices are currently scattered throughout the hospital’s campus, making it difficult for patients to find their doctors.

A new 183,000-square-foot, six-story addition to Kansas University Hospital is scheduled to open in spring 2011.

The building would be the long-awaited centralized home for offices for KU Physicians Inc., a group that includes most of the doctors for the KU Medical Center and KU Hospital.

Plans for the $73 million project were detailed in an affiliation agreement among KUPI, KU Hospital and KU Medical Center in 2007.

Leaders from all three institutions praised the project last week, saying that a centralized location for clinics that are currently scattered across the campus would have benefits for patients and the organizations serving them.

The new building will have a new parking garage and signs making it easier for patients to find their doctors’ offices, said Jon Jackson, KU Hospital senior vice president and chief administrative officer.

“While it’s not difficult to find the campus, sometimes it’s a little bit difficult to find the doctors’ offices,” Jackson said.

Nearly all of the ambulatory care offices will be housed in the building, he said. The building will attach to the southeast corner of the hospital and will house 211 practicing physicians and 219 residents from KU Medical Center, KUPI officials said.

Jackson said the building would be designed by Cannon Design, an international firm specializing in designing medical facilities.

“Everybody wanted it,” said Teresa Neely, chief operating officer for KUPI, noting that the affiliation agreement provided a way to finalize a building that had been in the works for years before the agreement was signed.

A groundbreaking ceremony for the building is set for July 22.

The new building will provide new opportunities in collaboration and faculty and student recruitment, said Doug Girod, chairman of the otolaryngology department at KU Medical Center and its senior associate dean for clinical affairs.

“Obviously, we’re excited about it,” Girod said, saying that the building would bring together space that would be used for training new doctors. “That is our classroom.”

KU Medical Center will lease space in the building from KU Hospital in a 30-year lease at $3.125 million per year, according to the affiliation agreement, though those terms are still being worked out, a hospital spokesman said.