YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Humility of Mary Health Partners is looking at the year 2037 as it moves forward on new construction projects that will shape not just the size of its three hospitals in the Mahoning Valley, but their personalities as well.
“What kind of hospital facilities do we need to have in Boardman, in Warren and in downtown Youngstown at St. Elizabeth?” asks Don Koenig, vice president of operations at St. Elizabeth Health Center, Youngstown.
The plan is for St. Elizabeth to enhance its capabilities as a trauma center where the most advanced medicine will continue to be practiced such as heart and brain surgeries.
The latest heart service coming to St. Elizabeth, in September, is a procedure called AF ablation therapy, a surgical procedure to correct atrial fibrillation that causes erratic heartbeat.
“When the whole seventh floor empties here to move out to Boardman, that gives me space to begin to move some things around, begin remodeling,” Koenig says. “We’re planning on close to $70 million in renovations here on the St. E’s campus so we can build new state-of-the-art intensive-care units for our most seriously ill patients.”
That $70 million is part of a larger $203.3 million investment in the three Mahoning Valley hospitals.
The largest investment -- a $103.7 million second tower -- will be built at the St. Elizabeth Boardman Health Center, Boardman, and a reflection of the population growth in Boardman, Canfield and Poland as well as the success of the Boardman hospital.
“The Boardman hospital has been one of the most successful projects in the history of Catholic Health Partners,” Koenig states. “It’s been very well received by the community and its very well designed to be an energy-efficient hospital.”
The campus was designed to allow the construction of the second tower at some point but that point arrived earlier than anyone expected, he explains.
HMHP received the money from Catholic Health Partners, Cincinnati, the larger health system to which it belongs, over other hospitals in the system.
Koenig attributes winning the funds to HMHP’s record great service to its communities.
HMHP will break ground on the tower in September and construction should last 18 months. Once the shell is completed and the first two floors open in the first quarter of 2014, the labor/delivery and maternity services in St. Elizabeth Youngstown will be relocated to Boardman and the $70 million renovations to the Youngstown campus can begin.
“It locates our mom-and-baby services where most of our population lives who are of childbearing age,” Koenig says.
The Akron Children’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit will also transfer to Boardman.
That does not mean the Youngstown campus will lose those services.
Akron Children’s Mahoning Valley operates a special-care nursery there and the hospital will also continue to have a high-risk pregnancy clinic for the benefit of expecting mothers who live close to downtown.
“When this is all done, the Boardman campus, in terms of patient capacity, will be pretty close to the size of St. E’s downtown because we will shrink a little bit in terms of bed capacity, Koenig says, “and St. E’s Boardman will become a fuller, more comprehensive community hospital.”
The Youngstown campus will reduce its bed capacity because by 2016 all three HMHP campuses will offer all patients private rooms.
“The era of the semi-private room is fading out and we’d like to help it fade out as quickly as possible,” Koenig says.
He compares sharing hospital rooms to checking into a Holiday Inn only to discover you’re going to share your room with a stranger who isn’t feeling too well.
Although St. Joseph Health Center, HMHP’s Warren campus, will not get the same dramatic overhauls as its Mahoning County counterparts, the health system’s hospital in Trumbull County hospital is not being neglected.
An $11 million investment there will go toward private rooms and work on the cafeteria, relocation of the St. Joseph Emergency and Diagnostic Center in Andover and installation of a new linear accelerator for cancer treatment as well as an expansion of radiation therapy services and creation of a Proteus digital radiology room.
Investment into outpatient care centers such as the emergency and diagnostic center in Andover may not be a rare event as health care practices move forward.
“As we are looking forward to health care reform. Everyone is focusing on the de-emphasis of the hospital as the center of the health care universe,” Koenig explains. “Hospitals will really be reserved for those patients that are so sick they must be at the hospital. Everyone’s focus, including our own, is how do we create much better, much more robust, ambulatory settings as we try to help patients, particularly those managing chronic illness to stay well and out of the hospital.”
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.