🔒CT hospitals investing big in new ‘patient-centered’ facilities

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Before building Stamford Hospital's new $450 million complex, top hospital executives sought the advice of former patients. They wanted to know what would give patients a better hospital experience.

Most of the answers, not surprisingly, had to do with comfort and privacy — patients wanted private rooms and their own bathrooms; places for visiting friends and family members to gather; and surroundings that felt as close to home as possible.

Kathleen Silard, executive vice president and COO for Stamford Health, said that feedback was a guiding force during construction of the new 640,000-square-foot building, which opened last September after more than a decade of planning.

Besides all new operating rooms, a new emergency department and a new consolidated Heart & Vascular Institute, the building includes five floors of all private patient rooms — 180 total — each with its own bathroom and a pull-out sofa for visitors.

There's a resource library where patients can research a diagnosis, said Silard, and spaces where loved ones can gather or retreat for peace and quiet. She said the entire facility was built to help deliver the promise of “patient-centered” care.

“No one wants to be hospitalized, so if you have to be here we want to make it a very warm and caring environment,” she explained. “We paid a lot of attention to art, to colors — to really making it as comfortable as possible for the patient.”

Depending on how you measure it, Stamford Hospital's new facility represents one of the largest hospital construction projects in Connecticut's history by cost, behind a new $500 million hospital tower and outpatient pavilion UConn Health debuted over the past two years.

In addition, Yale New Haven Health's Smilow Cancer Hospital, which was completed in 2009, cost approximately $470 million.

Earlier this year, Hartford Hospital opened a $150-million orthopedic specialty hospital called the Bone & Joint Institute. The 130,000-square-foot facility includes 48 inpatient rooms, eight operating rooms and rehab and wellness areas for outpatients. A 75,000-square-foot outpatient surgery and medical center is connected by a skywalk.

Stephen Frayne, senior vice president for health policy with the Connecticut Hospital Association, said the hospital investments are being driven by aging facilities, higher patient demand and a transformation both in technology and the way that care is delivered.

“It's not an expansion per se, it's really the hospitals continually looking at the communities they serve, the medical needs of that community and what is the current standard practice,” Frayne said. “If a facility was built 40 years ago, 50 years ago or 100 years ago, it's not logical to assume that it's still going to be optimally functional for what's required now.”

Need for space

In Stamford, planning for the new hospital complex began more than 13 years ago under current President and CEO Brian G. Grissler, who realized the hospital's old and disconnected buildings couldn't handle the rapidly changing, high-tech and patient-centered methods of delivering care, said Silard.

Like many hospitals around the state, she said there was also a need for more capacity in the emergency department. The ER had been handling 50,000 visits a year — double what the space had been built to accommodate. The new building can handle 100,000 visits, she said, and includes a dedicated pediatric emergency department. The new hospital also features a helipad for receiving trauma patients.

Meanwhile, the expanded surgical floor includes large, modern operating rooms with the latest in robotic surgery and other technologies for more complex and hybrid procedures.

Silard said the biggest challenge for patients so far is finding their way around. To help, the hospital introduced a mobile app, called Stamford Health Find My Way, which helps patients navigate to key locations. The app gives directions to major departments and high-traffic spots like the cafeteria, gift shop, elevators, stairways and restrooms. It also provides links to bill pay, patient portals and the hospital's Facebook and Twitter feeds.

In December, Stamford Health opened its $41.7 million Integrated Care Pavilion, a 97,000-square-foot physician office building adjacent to the new hospital featuring three levels of clinical offices over a 382-parking space deck. The two facilities are connected by a glass-enclosed catwalk.

Finding new docs

Silard said the new hospital and office complex has been a useful recruiting tool. The hospital expects to hire up to 100 new employees by the end of 2017, and the changes have “allowed us to recruit some world-renowned physicians,” said Silard.

“They want to come and practice in this spectacular new environment,” she said.

Hospital officials say the project has stimulated the economy in other ways — by fueling reinvestment in the surrounding neighborhood, including the building of new mixed-income housing near the hospital on the city's West Side.

Frayne said there's typically a “ripple effect” when a hospital invests in a community. “For every dollar spent within the hospital, it doubles by rippling out through the local economy,” he said.

A study released by the hospital association in Jan. 2016 found Connecticut hospitals contributed $21.3 billion to state and local economies in 2014, including $10.9 billion in annual local payroll, $8.8 billion in spending on goods and services and $1.6 billion in capital spending.