Graham Construction & Management Inc., of Spokane, recently began work on a $540,000 project to build out top-floor medical spaces for a pulmonary care practice in the 10-story Deaconess Health and Education Center, just west of Deaconess Hospital.

Graham plans to complete the work by April in about 5,800 square feet of office space for Pulmonary & Critical Care, a five-doctor physicians' group that has a total staff of 15 people and is employed by Deaconess Hospital.

The new space will have 12 exam rooms, a lab, doctors' offices, and reception and waiting areas for the practice, says Doug Hammond, a Spokane-based business development manager for Graham. Ascension Group Architects, of Arlington, Texas, designed the space.

This latest project completes full build-out of medical spaces in the top four stories of the Deaconess office building, after a series of construction jobs that Graham has completed within the past two years totaling at least $4.8 million, Hammond says. The completion comes about a decade after Deaconess expanded the building to add those four floors.

Hammond says that the building, located at 910 W. Fifth, originally was designed by NAC|Architecture and built in two phases. The original six-story building was erected in 1994. The second phase, a four-story addition, was built in 2001.

However, top-floor interior spaces remained empty until this latest series of projects, with most of them completed last year, Hammond says.

Julie Holland, a Deaconess spokeswoman, says the top stories were built a decade ago for anticipated future growth. "They had built it hoping for growth, but they didn't have the funding back then to fill it," she says. "It used to be an empty shell up there."

She adds, "We're doing a little reshuffling based on what makes sense for our patients on campus."

Holland says that Pulmonary & Critical Care will move from smaller quarters on the fifth floor of the building, but future use of that vacated space hasn't been determined yet. With its new 10th-floor space, the pulmonary care practice also will have room for pulmonary function testing and a growing research component, she says.

Another recent Graham project in the upper floors included a roughly $1.2 million remodel of a 14,000-square-foot space on the 10th floor for Inland Cardiology Associates PS, which moved there in September. Early last year, Graham finished a $1.1 million project in 10,200 square feet of floor space on the ninth floor for the Rockwood Heart & Vascular Center.

Additionally, Graham completed a $520,000 remodeling job last spring in a 5,500-square-foot ninth-floor space for six echocardiography rooms, two treadmill-stress test areas, four nuclear cameras, offices, and waiting and reception areas. The updated space is used as an outpatient cardiac diagnostic testing center by both Inland Cardiology Associates PS and the Rockwood Heart & Vascular Center, Holland says.

On the eighth floor, Graham handled a roughly $1.5 million remodel for Rockwood Surgical Group & Weight Loss Surgery Center, and for Rockwood Urology Center, Hammond says.

Deaconess, Valley Hospital, and Rockwood Clinic, all owned by Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health Systems Inc., announced this fall that they are unifying brand identity under the newly established name of Rockwood Health System.

Individually, the medical centers' names are being shortened to Deaconess Hospital and Valley Hospital, but signage and other communications from the three entities also will display the Rockwood Health System name.

CHS bought Empire Health Services and its assets, including Deaconess Medical Center and Valley Hospital & Medical Center, in 2008. More recently, CHS bought Rockwood Clinic, a longtime Spokane-based multispecialty medical practice. CHS also formed an affiliate network last year that acquired Spokane-based Inland Cardiology Associates PS and moved its main Spokane office to the Deaconess campus.