Rochester Hills is now home to a new $20 million health and wellness center that will offer not only the obvious, medical treatment and therapy to patients, but also a workout facility, massage therapies, tai chi, yoga, personal training and numerous other healthy lifestyle services to patients, employees and the general public.
It will also add jobs to the local economy and could even spur development.
The three-story, 98,000-square-foot
Beaumont Health & Wellness Center sits on 6.5 acres near M-59, on South Boulevard between Dequindre and John R. roads. A 45,000-square-foot
Sola Life & Fitness is the centerpiece of the facility. Sola, the first tenant, offers an indoor track, exercise areas for individuals and classes, a four-lane lap pool, therapy tubs, sauna, and steam room.
Surrounding Sola are several medical practices, including the Center for Pain Medicine, a rehabilitation services and integrative medicine practice, and an MRI testing unit, which is coming this summer. As a whole the Health & Wellness Center is meant to be a place to treat illness and injuries whiley keeping people strong and healthy through exercise and education.
The center is open to Beaumont patients, employees, and the general public and is competitively priced to other fitness centers, says Eric Hunter, senior vice president for administration services.
"Certainly the medical-based follow-up and return to health and staying healthy is a big theme," Hunt says. "But it's also about exercise for our employees to stay healthy and for the general public."
The Beaumont Health and Wellness Center -- a concept that is expected to spread here -- is the longtime aspiration of Beaumont CEO Gene Michalski, who was introduced to the usefulness of a wellness center while working for a hospital near Chicago, Hunt says. Landmark Healthcare Facilities and Dr. Richard Easton, director of spine surgery at Beaumont collaborated on the project, which could also act as an economic stimulator.
Besides the $20 million investment in the center, new employees have been hired and more development may follow. Of about 60 employees, probably 60 percent of them are new hires, and the other 40 percent transferred from other Beaumont operations, Hunt says.
"We think this number will grow over time," he says.
Around the Beaumont Health & Wellness Center is vacant, development-ready land. The possibility of the center attracting hundreds, if not thousands, of people each day (Sola has 1,400 members already), could be a magnet for new developments.
"Who knows, maybe a little medical row," Hunt suggests. "This has been in the cooker for quite awhile. We're very happy to get this off the ground."
Source: Eric Hunt, Beaumont Hospital's senior vice president of administration services
Writer: Kim North Shine
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