After years of construction and months of training and tours, Rush University Medical Center’s new building will finally start serving patients this weekend.

“What we’re focused on is moving into the institution, and there are a lot of moving parts that go with that,” Dr. Larry Goodman, Rush’s CEO said. “It should be fully functional early in the week.”

One of the biggest tasks will be physically moving patients across the campus, including the entire emergency room and intensive care units.

“From the patient standpoint, many patients every day leave their bed, come down for a test and come back up,” Goodman said. “So the transfer on a one patient basis is nothing unique because all of it’s enclosed and all of it’s connected.”

On a larger scale though, it’s a very complicated and thoroughly planned out process, he said.

“When you’re doing it on a large basis, when you’re doing it for the intensive care department and the emergency department, then that’s where we have a lot of people involved and we have a lot of safety checks to make sure that this goes very, very smoothly,” Goodman said. “It’s not going to be herding everybody at the same time. It’s going to be highly organized, area by area. We’ve got a lot of planning that has gone into this, we anticipate it’ll go smoothly, but you know, it’s not done ’til it’s done.”