Featured Image: An advanced procedure room in the new Heart Hospital. (Image provided by SLUHN)
St. Luke’s University Health Network is pleased to announce/unveil its new St. Luke’s Heart Hospital – opening at St. Luke’s Anderson Campus in October!
The $252 million Heart Hospital is the largest construction project in St. Luke’s more than 150-year history, both in terms of dollar figure and square footage.
The five-story, approximately 355,000-square-foot facility, constructed entirely of American steel, is seamlessly integrated into St. Luke’s Anderson Campus. A central corridor on each of the upper floors stretches 330 feet — roughly the length of a football field.
Construction began in 2024 and has employed hundreds of skilled workers. Once fully operational, the Heart Hospital will support hundreds of permanent, family-sustaining healthcare jobs.
The new facility will provide patients with convenient access to the full spectrum of St. Luke’s nationally recognized cardiovascular services, including four dedicated heart operating rooms, one hybrid operating room, ten advanced interventional suites for cardiac catheterization, electrophysiology and interventional radiology, in addition to a specially designed cardiac intensive care unit providing high-acuity heart patients advanced specialized care.
Additionally, the Heart Hospital will be fully equipped with the latest, most innovative equipment and technologies to best treat our cardiac patients. This includes brand new, state-of-the-art imaging equipment to see and assess the most intricate heart issues, heart-lung machines to take over pumping blood during open-heart surgeries and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machines to provide patients with continuous, long term cardiopulmonary support.
Despite its size and complexity, the project was completed at a relatively low per-square-foot cost by industry standards, a testament to St. Luke’s extensive experience in hospital construction. In recent years, St. Luke’s has built five full-service acute care hospitals — more than any other health system in Pennsylvania.
Designed to support learning and innovation, the Heart Hospital furthers St. Luke’s educational mission through expanded teaching space and a new cardiac fellowship program. It also incorporates numerous design innovations intended to improve efficiency and enhance patient experience. For example, internal service corridors provide staff access to supplies and other support areas, facilitating better workflow.
The facility also includes features that will improve flow and otherwise benefit the broader Anderson Campus, including a rooftop helipad and a new larger cafeteria.
Located on a 500-acre campus overlooking the Lehigh River, St. Luke’s Anderson Campus opened 15 years ago as Pennsylvania’s first new full-service acute-care hospital in four decades.
Since then, the campus has continued to expand to meet the region’s healthcare needs. The original campus included a state-of-the-art cancer center and medical office building. In 2017, the addition of a $26 million Specialty Pavilion added new specialty services and an Ambulatory Surgery Center. In 2020, the $90 million Women & Babies Pavilion opened, introducing labor and delivery services, a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), graduate medical education space and a simulation teaching center, while doubling the size of the existing hospital.
The new Heart Hospital adds 140 beds and nearly doubles the size of the Anderson Campus yet again.
The Anderson Campus is also home to the St. Luke’s Rodale Institute Organic Farm, which supplies fresh produce to St. Luke’s hospitals, as well as an extensive network of popular walking trails. During the summer and fall, the campus’s iconic sunflower and cosmos fields attract thousands of visitors from across the region.
About St. Luke’s
Founded in 1872, St. Luke’s University Health Network (SLUHN) is a fully integrated, regional, non-profit network with annual net revenue of more than $4.5 billion. With 23,000+ employees at 16 hospital campuses and 350+ outpatient sites, it is the Lehigh Valley’s biggest employer.
The Network’s service area includes 11 counties in two states: Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, Bucks, Carbon, Montgomery, Monroe, Schuylkill and Luzerne counties in Pennsylvania and Warren and Hunterdon counties in New Jersey. St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital is based at the Bethlehem Campus.
Dedicated to advancing medical education, St. Luke’s is the preeminent teaching hospital in central-eastern Pennsylvania. In partnership with Temple University, the Network established the Lehigh Valley’s first and only four-year medical school. It also operates the nation’s oldest continuously operated School of Nursing, established in 1884, and 60+ fully accredited graduate medical educational programs with 550+ residents and fellows. Additionally, the St. Luke’s College of Health Sciences opened in 2026.
In a 2025 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, St. Luke’s achieved the highest quality score of the nation’s recognized top three high performing health systems. This objective recognition, based on public data reported to the government, reaffirms St. Luke’s preeminent position as THE BEST OF THE BEST among the most respected health care systems in the United States.
St. Luke’s has been named a Leapfrog Group Top Hospital and a Newsweek World’s Best Hospital. In 2026, all of the Network’s eligible hospital campuses were awarded Medicare’s highest ratings for quality, efficiency and patient satisfaction. The Network also earned straight A’s for safety from Leapfrog across all of its acute care hospitals. It has earned 100 Top Hospital designations from Premier 12 years in a row, including in 2026 when the Network was identified as THE #1 MEDIUM-SIZE HEALTH SYSTEM IN THE COUNTRY. Utilizing the Epic electronic medical record (EMR) system for both inpatient and outpatient services, the Network is a multi-year recipient of the Most Wired award recognizing the breadth of SLUHN’s information technology applications such as telehealth, online scheduling and online pricing information.
Information provided to TVL by:
Sam Kennedy
