IU Health Built a Youth Pipeline for Its Fort Wayne Hospital

IU Health is hiring more than 270 nurses for its new Fort Wayne hospital, months before patients are due on May 1, 2027. The five-story building on Ernst Road is still going up, and the health system is already posting intensive care, operating room, and emergency jobs.

The longer bench started years earlier, when the IU Health Foundation put $1 million into a Boys & Girls Clubs training floor and then walked Club teens through the job site itself.

Club Teens Walked a Live Hospital Job Site

On June 24, 2025, students from the Jim Kelley Career Pathway Center got a hard-hat look at IU Health’s first Fort Wayne hospital, still a steel-and-dirt campus in southern Allen County. Nicholas Gray, vice president of strategic partnerships and workforce development for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Fort Wayne, tied the visit to the Foundation grant that opened the center.

“A few years ago, we received a community impact grant from the IU Health foundation for a million dollars, which really helped us get our Jim Kelley Career Pathway Center off the ground,” Gray said.

Nine teens, from sixth grade through 11th, came from Leo, Snider, and South Side high schools, Smith Academy for Excellence, and Shawnee and Memorial middle schools. They met an architect and a managing engineer on an active site, and Brian Hensler, senior project manager for IU Health Construction, walked them through drawings of the lobby and surgery waiting area.

The stop sat inside a summer circuit that also sent the group to a General Motors plant, a solar company, and a heavy-equipment yard. Hensler told them the point was the range of work, not a single white-coat path.

“It’s really a wonderful experience for these kids to get involved, and to understand that there are many, many options out there,” Hensler said.

That is the part a ribbon-cutting photo misses. Some of those options are on the tools. IBEW Local 305 and Shambaugh & Son are already on the $421 million job, and high wind still stopped work on the site for an afternoon in March 2026. The clinical jobs are a different clock. A sixth-grader on that Tuesday tour will not be one of the nurses IU Health is recruiting this year.

What the New Hospital Will Hold

IU Health’s board signed off on the $421 million Fort Wayne hospital plan in 2024, six years after the system opened its south-side primary care office. The campus sits at 10101 Ernst Road in Roanoke, near I-69 and Airport Expressway, on a 300-acre site with room for more offices, green space, and trails.

Officials broke ground on Sept. 25, 2024. Crews placed the last steel beam on July 16, 2025, at a topping-out that drew about 200 people, including Mayor Sharon Tucker, who signed the beam. Pepper Construction is building a 140 beds and 17 emergency exam rooms hospital with six operating rooms, three catheterization labs, four endoscopy rooms, and a connected medical office building.

THE CAMPUS ON ERNST ROAD

Gresham Smith designed the five-story building. Since 2018, IU Health has added eight Fort Wayne-area locations and says it has served more than 30,000 patients. This is still the system’s first inpatient hospital in the city, and it will sit beside Parkview Health and Lutheran Health Network rather than replace them.

Dennis Murphy, president and CEO of IU Health, framed the spend as a price fight as much as a bed count.

We’ve heard the community’s call for more options in affordable healthcare, and as the state’s largest and only academic health system, we are committed to answering that need in support of our vision to make Indiana one of the healthiest states in the country.

Dennis Murphy, President and CEO, IU Health, July 15, 2024 announcement

Brian Bauer, president of IU Health Fort Wayne and a former Lutheran executive, has said he wants cooperation with the two systems already in town, not a formal partnership. A 2020 RAND Corporation study had already put Parkview among the country’s highest-priced systems, which is the opening IU Health keeps trying to walk through.

IU Health Sank 300 Wells Under the Campus

The mechanical story is underground. Hensler told the Club group this will be the first geothermal hospital in the IU Health system, a field of 300 wells, each 500 feet deep, that pulls or dumps heat instead of making it with electric boilers.

We are the first hospital in IU Health that is geothermal. So we have 300 wells, underground wells, that are 500 feet deep each, that we will reject or pull heat from those wells, versus using electricity to make that heat.

Brian Hensler, Senior Project Manager, IU Health Construction, June 24, 2025 site tour

Three hundred wells at 500 feet is 150,000 feet of borehole under one lawn. IU Health’s project page says the field should cut the building’s environmental load and lower long-term running costs. Hensler told the teens those savings are supposed to help keep care in reach. The system has not published a dollar figure or a kilowatt-hour target for the well field, so the cost claim stays where he left it.

CMTA designed the mechanical and electrical package around that field, and the skin of the building is being built to hold the tight temperatures a hospital needs. If the wells do what the drawings say, IU Health gets a cheaper building to run in a market where it still has to win patients from two entrenched networks.

The Grant That Bought a Training Floor

The Club side of the wager is already open. Auto dealer Tom Kelley bought a vacant building two doors from the Fairfield Avenue Club after president and CEO Joe Jordan pitched a trades school, and the Jim Kelley Career Pathway Center opened on Feb. 22, 2023. Local accounts put the remodel near $4.5 million. The IU Health Foundation’s check, presented on Dec. 19, 2022, paid for equipment, operations, and a bus so transportation was not the reason a kid stayed home.

The center now runs five labs in a 13,000-square-foot center aimed at the jobs a hospital campus actually uses, from pipe and steel to health sciences.

WHAT THE CENTER TRAINS

• Automotive: Teens work a full shop floor rather than a classroom diagram.
• Manufacturing: The lab is built for plant work that already sits all over Allen County.
• Construction trades: This is the path that put Club students on the Ernst Road site.
• Health sciences: The room feeds the IU Fort Wayne academy track, not a one-day tour.
• IT, robotics, and CAD: Students leave with OSHA and CPR cards plus resume and interview practice.

Fort Wayne Community Schools sends every seventh and eighth grader through the building each year. With IU Fort Wayne, the Clubs also run a Health Careers Academy at IU Fort Wayne that puts middle and high school students in labs for nursing, dental assisting and hygiene, radiography, sonography, public health, social work, and medicine. A six-week IU Health Academy has already walked students from radiation therapy to dental hygiene.

Gray’s title is workforce development for a reason. The Clubs say the center exists as much for employers who cannot find trained people as it does for the teens. IU Health paid to be first in that line.

Parkview Bought Land Across the Interstate

The third system is not arriving quietly. In October 2025, Parkview Health paid more than $2.9 million for about 30 acres on the northeast corner of I-69 and Lower Huntington Road, across the interstate from the IU Health campus. In a July 2026 statement, Parkview declined to name a use.

We do not have an immediate use for the Lower Huntington Road/I-69 property. Additional details about the potential development of each space will be shared with the community as plans are finalized.

Parkview Health, written statement, July 2026

IU Health has its own spare dirt. Property records show the system has held about 75 acres at the northeast corner of State Road 37 and I-469 since 2019, bought for $1.6 million. Asked about that parcel while the Ernst Road hospital was rising, IU Health said it was focused on the Fort Wayne hospital and on welcoming patients in May 2027.

Harvard health policy professor Anupam Jena argued in 2022 that another hospital would add beds and could push the incumbents on price, because IU Health would have to win patients from Parkview and Lutheran. Bauer has said Lutheran and Parkview “have tremendous caregivers who always keep patients at the center of things.” The land purchase across I-69 is a quieter sentence than that compliment.

More Than 270 Nursing Jobs Are Open Now

Building work is supposed to wrap in late October 2026. Patients are dated later. In an Aug. 19, 2026 hiring push, IU Health said construction is advancing toward a May 1, 2027 opening and that the hospital is expected to employ more than 600 team members and 60 providers. Pepper lists a 295,000-square-foot hospital now under construction plus the 50,000-square-foot office building that will share three floors of circulation with it.

THE OPENING ROSTER

• Nursing jobs: More than 270 roles in intensive care, progressive care, medical-surgical units, operating rooms, the cath lab, and emergency care.
• Next postings: Imaging technologists, medical assistants, registration staff, and other front-line jobs are due in coming months.
• Physicians: IU Health wants half of its doctor recruits to be new to northeast Indiana.
• Training: Residencies and clinical slots are being built for IU Fort Wayne students and for nursing students from regional programs, with tuition support in the package.

Those 270-plus nursing jobs are for people who can work a floor when the doors open. The Club labs and the IU Fort Wayne academy are how the system grows a local bench after that. Bauer has said the hospital will keep pulling talent into the region, and the project page still carries his line that the build is the next phase of a team already on the ground.

Mayor Tucker treated the July 16, 2025 topping-off as a city event, not a private topping of steel.

I was proud to attend the topping-off ceremony for @IU_Health’s new five-story hospital coming soon in Fort Wayne. Signing the final beam marked real progress and a stronger future for care in our city. pic.twitter.com/dIC8mLhw5r

— Mayor Sharon Tucker (@FortWayneMayor) July 17, 2025

FROM GRANT TO FIRST PATIENT

1. December 19, 2022: The IU Health Foundation presents a $1 million community impact grant at the Career Pathway Center, with a matching gift to Fort Wayne Community Schools.
2. February 22, 2023: The 13,000-square-foot Jim Kelley Career Pathway Center opens on Fairfield Avenue.
3. July 15, 2024: IU Health announces the $421 million hospital after board approval.
4. September 25, 2024: Officials break ground at 10101 Ernst Road.
5. June 24, 2025: Club teens tour the live job site.
6. July 16, 2025: The final steel beam goes up, made by Fort Wayne-based Steel Dynamics.
7. October 2025: Parkview buys about 30 acres across I-69.
8. August 19, 2026: IU Health posts the nursing push toward a May 1, 2027 opening.

The wells are in the ground, the job ads are up, and the first patient is still dated May 1, 2027. Fort Wayne will find out then whether a geothermal hospital and a Club training floor are enough to make a third system stick.