ATLANTA-Duke Realty continues to bet on the medical office sector in a down economy. The firm just broke ground on a $12.8 million medical office building in Roswell for North Fulton Hospital.

The 54,000-square-foot, three-story outpatient center is located on a three-acre site across from the hospital’s main entrance. It will be the first class A medical office building in the area and will house North Fulton Hospital’s Pain Management Clinic and Imaging Center services, as well as other physicians and healthcare practices.

“This new facility is an important commitment by North Fulton Hospital to meet the local need for a state-of-the-art class A medical office building,” says Debbie Keel, CEO of North Fulton. “We also expect the new facility will serve as an excellent tool for recruiting talented physicians.”

The medical office building offers an updated, functional design layout. The Pain Management Clinic will be built to ambulatory surgery center standards, which are more stringent than regulations covering typical medical office buildings. That means larger recovery rooms and operating rooms to accommodate more medical equipment, as well as following stricter safety and building code standards for construction materials and internal systems.

“We are start seeing more hospitals moving to outpatient centers but those generally take more time to underwrite because they are not on campus,” Jason Hinkel, senior vice president of the Southeast Region for Duke Realty, tells GlobeSt.com. “This particular project has been in the works for the past couple of years, which is the typical gestation period for a medical office building.”

The new facility will feature spa-like design elements in the registration area and women’s imaging/diagnostic center, a two-level atrium, high ceilings and canopy-covered drop-off/pick-up areas on the ground and first floors. The building will be connected on the ground and first floors to North Fulton’s adjacent parking deck and also will include 77 surface parking spaces. Duke is also building for LEED certification when the building opens in the fall of 2012.

“The Southeast region as a whole has been pretty strong for new medical office building development,” Hinkel says. “It’s still slower than it was three or four years ago, but we’ve done a number of new developments in the Raleigh, North Carolina area. We’ve done a couple of buildings in the Greater Atlanta area. This is the second new one we’ve done in the last two years.”