DeVos Children’s Hospital, McLaren partner to expand pediatric care in Lansing

DeVos Children’s Hospital, McLaren partner to expand pediatric care in Lansing
Plans for a new pediatric care clinic at McLaren Health Care’s Great Lansing medical campus.

LANSING — Corewell Health’s Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital plans to expand pediatric care in Lansing under an existing partnership with McLaren Health Care

DeVos Children’s Hospital plans to open a new, larger clinic on McLaren’s Greater Lansing medical campus that will upgrade and add specialties in pediatric care. The clinic will open this summer, alleviating the need for patients and their families in Lansing and surrounding areas to travel to Grand Rapids for specialized pediatric care. 

“The aim is to provide these services to the children of the greater Lansing area and to make care more convenient and as easy as possible for those patients,” said Dr. Anas Taqatqa, section chief of pediatric cardiology at DeVos Children’s Hospital’s Lansing clinic. 

“This will save patients the time to commute long distances in order to get these services,” Taqatqa said. 

The existing partnership between DeVos Children’s Hospital and McLaren goes back to 2007, starting with pediatric cardiology. The Lansing clinic began adding services in 2016, as physicians in other pediatric specialties traveled from Grand Rapids, Taqatqa said. Additional specialists have been hired in Lansing in the last couple of years, he said. 

The new campus that McLaren Health Greater Lansing opened a year ago in the University Health Park, adjacent to Michigan State University, provided the opportunity to expand the partnership even further and relocate from a nearby clinic, Taqatqa said. 

“The office in our clinic is small for us, and since the need in the Lansing area is enormous for pediatric specialists, we decided to expand more and partner with McLaren Hospital in their new location,” he said. 

Expanded services in Lansing include pediatric and adult congenital cardiology, fetal cardiology, pediatric orthopedics, rheumatology, gastrointestinal, plastic surgery, genetics, infectious disease, neurosurgery, pulmonology, endocrinology and nephrology. 

DeVos Children’s Hospital and McLaren Greater Lansing will also upgrade care at the hospital’s Birthing Center by providing pediatric hospitalists and neonatal nurse practitioners.  

A 60,400-square-foot medical services building that Gillespie Group built on the McLaren campus will house the DeVos Children’s Hospital clinic. 

“This relationship is a part of a broader strategy to provide convenient access to health care by keeping care local for the families we serve,” McLaren Greater Lansing President and CEO Kirk Ray said of the partnership with DeVos Children’s Hospital.