Memphis institutions renovating, updating, innovating

In order to maintain Memphis’ status as a premier medical community, the city’s hospitals, medical education centers and physician practices are spending millions of dollars to excavate, renovate, update and innovate. Recurring themes are surgery centers, rehabilitation centers and emergency department upgrades.

Methodist University Hospital is constructing a new emergency department and moving its main entrance from Eastmoreland to Bellevue. The emergency department will include underground ambulance parking and a new entrance on Bellevue. Scheduled to be completed in July, the emergency area employs a new design.

“This will be the first inner-core model ED in the state of Tennessee,” said Dave Rosenbaum, vice president, corporate facilities management, Methodist Le Bonheur Health Care. “All the medical care is centrally located in the inner area of the ED, surrounded by outer bays and corridors, so the patient and family are adjacent to the nurses’ station where all the critical medical activity is.”

The model provides for a smaller waiting room and more efficient triage so that patients are sent quickly to the exam room. A call system similar to those in restaurants will alert family when a patient’s procedure is done.

Methodist is also completing an expansion and renovation of the emergency department at its Germantown location, adding approximately 3,000 square feet and six exam rooms.

Downtown, Methodist Le Bonheur is taking down an existing parking deck and putting a physician office building in its place. An existing building originally constructed in the 1990s to house physician offices now houses outpatient clinics, so physicians are scattered throughout the campus. Building on the new parking garage has begun and the physician building should be done in spring or summer of 2015.

Baptist is constructing Baptist Cancer Center, in excess of 150,000 square feet and scheduled to be completed in autumn of 2015.

“The Baptist Cancer Center will be the first integrated center in the Mid-South area,” said Zach Chandler, vice president of metro-Memphis market for Baptist Memorial Health Care. “It gives more convenient access to outpatient cancer services. Our goal is for the center to become a regional resource for cancer patients and their families.”

The $84 million facility will have diagnostics, radiation oncology, chemotherapy/infusion, cyberknife, physician offices, a stem cell transplant center, support services, survivorship care and the adjacent Women’s Health Center (diagnostic and screening mammography) and multidisciplinary clinics.

Baptist is also building a 49-bed rehabilitation hospital at the corner of Wolf River Boulevard and Germantown Parkway. It will contain all private rooms and a dedicated stroke unit, an activity of daily living space, a mobility courtyard and a therapy gym. It should be completed late this year and will serve patients recovering from complex neurological conditions, strokes, brain and spinal cord injuries, complex orthopedic injuries, amputations and other conditions.

Also scheduled to be completed late this year is Baptist’s pediatric emergency department relocation. The $14 million project moves the department to the Baptist Women’s Hospital, which Baptist officials say their affiliated pediatricians have been requesting for years. The move will mean an expansion from five to eight exam rooms and the addition of outpatient pediatric diagnostics, including an MRI with pediatric anesthesia available.

“A new service Baptist will be offering is the Pediatric Eye Center, the area’s first comprehensive eye center for babies and children. This is an important service, particularly for premature babies, who often have trouble with their eyes,” Chandler said.

The newly named Regional Medical Center, formerly The MED, just finished three floors in Turner Tower with three different functions: a new outpatient surgery center, an updated long-term acute care hospital and a relocated rehabilitation hospital. In addition, the burn center receives another dedicated operating suite and a cosmetic upgrade to match the rest of the building.

The relocation of the rehabilitation hospital from the Adams Building will allow for an expansion of medical areas and all private patient rooms. The outpatient surgery center brings a new service to the Regional Medical Center, said Angie Golding, director, corporate strategic communications.

“We are glad to have all these services on board in an attractive, convenient and accessible location,” she said. “And all those areas where we are spending money now should drive revenue later.”

Delta Medical Center just completed renovation to surgical suites, behavioral health units and an expansion of its emergency department. The emergency department was enlarged by 1,500 square feet for better traffic.

“It was essentially to fast track and expedite customer service. The way it was designed in past just did not have space to effectively triage patients and get them into the ER as quickly as possible,” said Bill Patterson, chief executive officer, Delta Medical Center.

The behavioral unit renovation meant updating cosmetic features and bathrooms and bringing “major updates” to safety systems to make them current with modern standards. The infrastructure and technology of the surgery suites was updated to allow for more orthopedic procedures.

Campbell Clinic has purchased a property in the medical center and renovated it to become another Campbell surgery center, opening in just a couple of weeks.

“The facility should be able to manage 50 patients per day when operational," said Cindy Armistead, Campbell surgery center administrator. "This will double Campbell Clinic’s existing outpatient surgery capacity, providing patients in the western half of the Mid-South with an additional, convenient option for outpatient orthopedic surgery.”

The center, on Pauline Street, has four full-size operating rooms, six pre-op bays, nine post-anesthesia care unit bays with an additional two beds in a pediatric recovery area. There is one sitting room and two overnight rooms. The new facility will improve access for patients from downtown, midtown, eastern Arkansas, Millington and Southaven, joining the Brierbrook Campbell Surgery Center, serving patients out east since 2002.

The University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) has been putting hundreds of millions of dollars into a five-year, multi-facet campus overhaul that began in 2012. The main features of phase one include completion of the pharmacy building, complete renovation of the library, some general capital improvements and construction of a translational research building and a cancer research building. The price tag is approximately $250 million for this phase.

“In the science world, it is very hard to recruit funded investigators," said Kennard Brown, JD, MPA, PhD, FACHE, executive vice chancellor and chief operations officer, UTHSC. "You have to have those up-to-date facilities like the translational research building which will focus on bench to bedside applications to get them. That is what every facility across the country is trying to do now — you have to have these state-of-the-art facilities to do that."

Phase two includes demolition of four designated buildings — the Fuert Building, the Beale Building, Randolph Hall and Goodman Dormitory to make room for new projects. A $30 million simulation laboratory will be built in the space where the Fuert Building stood. This phase also includes renovation of the historic quadrangle, including the Crowe, Looney and Nash buildings and the Nash Annex, as well as various capital maintenance projects.

University officials have aspirations toward a third phase with renovation of the dental building, a new college of medicine building, a women’s and infants pavilion, housing and urban revitalization/development partnerships.