Hello and welcome to living in the Lehigh Valley, where our focus is your health and wellness.

I'm your host, Brittany Sweeney.

A brand-new hospital opened over the summer to rehab patients in the Lehigh Valley.

Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network moved most of its services from Allentown to Center Valley in Upper Saucon Township, adding more space and more jobs.

Health care operations in the Lehigh Valley have been expanding for decades and Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network says it is keeping up with that growth.

We needed more room.

We needed more beds to be able to serve more people.

And we made a decision, really, it was a little over three years ago that the best choice for Good Shepherd would be to build a replacement hospital here, in Center Valley.

Michael Spiegel is Good Shepherd's president and CEO.

With a few finishing touches still in progress on the facade, the four-story state of the art rehabilitation facility held a ribbon cutting in July.

Spiegel says, after more than 40 years at the Allentown location, it was time to upgrade and expand to a 78-bed hospital.

So the reason we decided to build a new rehabilitation hospital goes back to the fact that our hospital has been where it is for over 40 years and times change and people's expectation changes and technology changes.

The new 23,000 square foot building will serve patients who may have had a stroke, spinal cord injury or traumatic brain injury, among other ailments.

This is a four-story hospital.

First floor is all of our visitor services.

Our second floor is primarily dedicated to our spinal cord injury rehabilitation program.

Our third floor for people who've had strokes and other medical complexities.

And then our fourth floor is our brain injury rehabilitation program.

In addition to the varying patient services, the Empower Plus section of the hospital shows off new technology used to make the lives of patients easier.

It is an interactive education space for our patients, their families, members of the disability community, to learn and access a wide variety of technologies that can help them live more independently.

Amanda Clark is the director of Good Shepherd Creates, a group within the rehab network, putting new practices and programs in place to help patients navigate their day to day activities.

Some of the examples of the technology you can find here are technologies to help someone live in place, to help them really thrive in their home and community, like smart home medication reminders, fall detection systems.

We have an amazingly fun adaptive gaming setup so that people can experience the possibilities of gaming, no matter your ability.

Within the Empower Plus section, Good Shepherd also teamed up with Moravian University to create a 3D experience equipped with 3D printers that can print tools for patients to use every day.

It's going to allow us to really utilize the powers of 3D printing within rehabilitation so that we can print custom devices for our patients and residents to help meet their unique needs and help them live more independently.

With the expansion, the health network is also looking to hire more talent to their team.

Spiegel says the hospital kept existing staff but will hire about 50 new positions over the next year.

This is the only hospital in Lehigh Valley that is fully dedicated to inpatient rehabilitation services.

That means we serve people after they've had some serious, if not catastrophic, event where they have spent some extended period of time in an acute care hospital and then require intensive medical and rehabilitation services.

The new hospital is just off Route 309, across Center Valley Parkway from the Promenade Shops.

Spiegel said the plan is to renovate the old Allentown location as it remains the site of some business offices and long-term care patients, but the future of that location is still being decided.

That will do it for this edition of Living in the Lehigh Valley.

I'm Brittany Sweeney, hoping you stay happy and healthy.