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Hospitals Invest Millions to Upgrade Patient Care
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Tomorrow ValleyCare Health System of Ohio will cut the ribbon on its $20 million renovation and expansion of Northside Medical Center in Youngstown.
The project represents a substantial portion of the $80 million Community Health Systems Inc. pledged to invest in the former Forum Health when it acquired those assets in 2010. Included in that upgrade is a new emergency department that features 21 private exam and trauma rooms and a new tower that features a main lobby, outpatient lab services, pre-admission testing, an information center, waiting area and gift shop.
That upgrade, which involves the largest expansion of the Northside campus since 1998, is among several capital projects underway or completed at hospitals in the five-county northeastern Ohio-western Pennsylvania region.
Three of the region’s health-care systems The Business Journal contacted have finished or are completing new towers at hospitals. The projects at area hospitals – aimed at achieving goals such as better patient care, more privacy and even greater convenience in some cases – include improving emergency departments, converting to single-patient rooms – even something as basic as providing a new face to a longtime institution.
Northside Medical Center
“This is called our front-door project,” remarks Lori Sylvester, vice president of project management for ValleyCare, of the expansion at Northside. “We’re bringing a lot of our outpatient services to an area that’s accessible to the public.” For example, a patient who needs to pick up medical records can get them easily as opposed to walking through the entire hospital.
“On the second floor will be our same-day surgery care and on the third floor is our endoscopy suite,” she says. “I look at it almost as an outpatient facility that’s connected to the hospital.”
“The good news is we’ve been able to maintain all of our services at the levels that we’ve been wanting to run them as we did before the construction,” adds Kent Brown, Northside chief operating officer and interim CEO. “We’ve had some interruptions relative to the emergency department in terms of rerouting patients but we’ve always been able to accommodate them.”
Work on the emergency department is one part of the project, structured in five phases, that won’t be complete when officials snip the ribbon July 8. Instead, it will be completed over the next six months, Sylvester says.
Capital spending at Trumbull Memorial Hospital in Warren, ValleyCare’s other primary care hospital, has chiefly involved equipment, such as investments in robotics.
Humility of Mary Health Partners
Humility of Mary Health Partners opened the first component of its new tower project at the St. Elizabeth Boardman Health Center in April when maternity services and the neonatal intensive care unit relocated there from St. Elizabeth Health Center in Youngstown.
“Currently we are building out the fifth and seventh floors,” reports Wayne Tennant, HMHP vice president for support services. Select Specialty Hospital is leasing the seventh floor and will take occupancy in September. The fifth floor, which will be completed in October, will open in January as a medical-surgical unit.
“October is the construction schedule and then [making the floor operational] takes a little time,” Tennant says. The sixth floor will likely remain a shell space until 2016, “when we would anticipate building that out according to our business plan. That again would be hospital beds identical to the other floors in general.”
The $100 million invested in the Boardman campus, which should have more than 250 patient beds once completed, represents half, perhaps more, of HMHP’s anticipated investment in its local hospitals, first announced two years ago. Projects planned for the St. Elizabeth main campus and St. Joseph Health Center in Warren are in the $70 million to $100 million range “so it’s a significant investment into our facilities as well as into the community,” Tennant says.
At the St. Elizabeth main campus in Youngstown, a new recovery area and two additional operating rooms are being added, an $8 million project that he anticipates will be complete by year-end. One goal is converting all patient beds to private rooms. “It’s state-of-the-art in patient care,” he says. “It’s best for the patients and for the clinicians. Tennant anticipates further work at the Youngstown campus over 2015 through 2017, while a timeframe “really hasn’t been established” for the St. Joseph campus.
Salem Regional Medical Center
A new 169,700-square-foot patient room tower that cost $42.5 million opened in February. The tower represents the largest expansion project in Salem Regional Medical Center’s 100-year history, remarks Michele Hoffmeister, director of public relations.
“The top-three floors of the new tower house 87 private patient rooms, including 10 for the intensive-care unit and 17 rooms for ‘step-down’ cardiac care on the first floor,” she begins, and “30 rooms for surgical patients on the second floor, with four of the rooms designed to also accommodate pediatric patients; and 30 rooms for medical/surgical patients on the third floor.”
The bottom floors in the tower offer two levels of enclosed, free parking for patients and visitors. The floors connect to the Salem hospital’s new ground-floor concourse and enhanced public areas.
During the past year, Salem Regional became the first hospital between Cleveland and Pittsburgh to introduce 3T Open MRI, an advanced technology that Hoffmeister says provides the fastest, most detailed magnetic resonance imaging of the body, brain, spine, extremities and breasts. The hospital also offers the Mahoning Valley’s only 3-D virtual CT colonoscopy and low-dose CT lung cancer screening, she adds.
“Salem Regional Medical Center is revising its plans to repurpose to the space left by the vacation of the inpatient areas to the new tower,” she says. In additional, the hospital will continue to expand its medical imaging services with new, state-of-the-art diagnostic technology planned for the 3T MRI, she says.
Jameson Health System
Jameson Hospital in New Castle, Pa., recently marked the anniversary of its new 55,000-square-foot emergency and surgical wing.
“We outgrew our previous facility,” says Neil Chessin, vice president of operations for Jameson Health System. “With a shift from inpatient volume to outpatient growth, emergency and surgical service lines are key growth areas for our hospital that we knew we needed to accommodate in a more contemporary way.
“The new facilities are equipped with leading-edge technology and are built to align with new technologies as they evolve,” he continues. “This capital expansion has been a catalyst to drive us into the new era of health-care delivery for our community.”
Costs of the project, including internal technology and furnishings, came to $22 million, Chessin says. Jameson has 30 private patient rooms designed for a more efficient workflow to accommodate the 40,000 emergency visits annually.
“The new surgical department is designed to accommodate the specific needs of our population with larger operating rooms to accommodate our volume of orthopedic surgery,” Chessin says. “The space promotes privacy and comfort, and employs advanced technology for even more precise diagnostics and efficiencies.”
Over the past year, visits to the emergency department increased by nearly 5%, and surgical procedures have grown by nearly 6%, he reports.
Other capital projects took into account changes taking place at the national and state levels. These changes “took our focus on technology from diagnostic advancements to also include managing information electronically,” says Jameson CEO Doug Danko.
“We’ve committed over $4 million to accomplish the expansion of our information technology infrastructure,” he notes. “This includes electronic medical records and care documentation, computerized physician order entry and an online health information portal.”
Sharon Regional Health System
Sharon Regional Health System in Sharon, Pa., acquired April 1 by CHS, ValleyCare Ohio’s parent company, is investing $3 million in what spokesman Ed Newmeyer describes as “routine capital improvements” over the next six months, to wit, new equipment and other upgrades, part of the agreement with CHS.
“This initial routine capital investment is focused on new equipment for patient care areas including a video tower upgrade for surgery, new medication scanners for the nursing units, new patient beds for both the transitional care unit and inpatient rehabilitation unit, and more,” he says. The upgrades help Sharon Regional staff “in our goal of providing our patients with the highest quality patient care as well as supporting the staff who deliver that care,” he adds.
CHS committed to make $75 million available over the next five years to Sharon Regional when it acquired the system. Strategic planning is underway “to identify areas for growth, opportunities for recruiting additional primary care physicians and specialists, and to evaluate additional areas for capital improvements and enhancements,” Newmeyer says.
Akron Children’s Hospital Mahoning Valley
Among the improvements over the past year at Akron Children’s Hospital Mahoning Valley in Boardman are installation of a Magnetom Aera 1.5T MRI scanner and relocation of sedation services into the MRI suite, a $2 million project; moving the neonatal intensive-care unit from St. Elizabeth Health Center in Warren to the St. Elizabeth Boardman campus, a $7 million initiative; and a $1.9 million construction and renovation of inpatient units at the Beeghly campus.
“These improvements are designed to align with state-of-the-art design practices and focus on family-centered care to better meet our patients’ needs,” says Lisa Taafe, clinical administrative director. Moving from the St. Elizabeth campus in Youngstown, “where we had a very open concept,” to the Boardman campus, provided single rooms for patients.
“Research shows that the infection rate decreases in a single-patient room environment. It also indicates that families are able to participate more in the care of their children,” Taafe says.
Akron Children’s is employing the same concept for neonatal families at the Beeghly campus, she continues. “By fall, we will have single-patient rooms, allowing them all the benefits that come from this more individual, private setting,” she says. The inpatient pediatric unit will include two rooms designed to accommodate siblings, allowing families to stay together when children are hospitalized.
Among future projects are offering lab, radiology, cardiology and orthopedic services in space adjacent to Akron Children’s primary-care office in Warren and a $750,000 initiative expected to go live this fall, Taafe reports. The hospital recently announced plans to operate the pediatric unit and special-care nursery in St. Joseph Health Center in Warren.
Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the July edition of The Business Journal.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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