AHN, Highmark Health and Local Leaders Celebrate Rebirth of Former Bellevue Hospital as Center for Primary and Holistic Care, Health Innovation and Community Partnerships

BELLEVUE, Pa. (October 17, 2023) – When Suburban General Hospital in Pittsburgh’s northern suburb of Bellevue closed its doors as an inpatient, acute care facility more than a decade ago, local leaders and community residents lamented the uncertain future of the sprawling campus on South Jackson Avenue. This week, many of those same leaders and residents will join officials from Allegheny Health Network (AHN) and Highmark Health to celebrate the rebirth of the century-old facility – now named AHN Suburban - as a community-focused center for health innovation.

AHN and Highmark Health formally cut the ribbon to AHN Suburban and opened its doors to the community on Saturday, Oct. 21, from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m.

Open house attendees had the opportunity to tour the facility and campus – including an indoor family trick-or-treat trail, learn about the many programs and health-focused start-up companies that have set up headquarters on the campus, watch combat robotics demonstrations, enjoyed free food and live entertainment, toured the AHN Chill Mobile van, and visited with the Pittsburgh Riverhounds mascot, Amo.

Children wore their Halloween costumes for the event.  Participating food vendors were local chefs and caterers who use AHN Suburban’s commercial kitchen as a home base for their business operations, through programs like Catapult Culinary. 

AHN Suburban has served the community in a variety of capacities for more than 115 years. Formerly known as AGH Suburban Hospital, and before that Bellevue General Hospital, the nearly 230,000-square-foot facility has experienced significant transformation and revitalization since closing its inpatient units and emergency departments in 2010. 

“It’s not often that an old hospital is transformed into an entirely different kind of community resource after it closes,” said Jeff Cohen, MD, chief physician executive for community health and innovation at AHN. “In just a few years, we have been able to repurpose this facility to create a health-focused community innovation hub that is unique to the region - as an incubator and accelerator of novel solutions to many of the challenges we face in health care, and as a site for partnerships with other community organizations and institutions that share our values and mission.”

Under Dr. Cohen’s leadership, AHN Suburban now serves as a home to local, national, and international startup companies exploring the next generation of healthcare innovations (through AHN’s AlphaLab Health partnership with Innovation Works); AHN’s Environmental Services training center: a brand-new AHN primary care clinic, the AHN Cancer Institute Exercise Oncology fitness center; a greenhouse for horticulture therapy; the Highmark Wholecare-Inglis partnership:, satellite classrooms for Northgate School District; and a variety of other community-focused collaborations.

“At AHN and Highmark Health, we have framed our vision for how we can transform health and wellness in the communities we serve around a model that we call Living Health,” said Jim Benedict, president of AHN. “That model is built on the idea that you can create a better healthcare ecosystem by empowering more individuals to take ownership of their health, focusing not just on access to high-quality clinical care and resources but on purposeful community engagements, and all those social determinants of health that impact patient outcomes and a region’s overall quality of life.”