🔒Settlement allows Hartford HealthCare to add ORs at Bridgeport’s St. Vincent’s Medical Center

Ten months after filing its application, Hartford HealthCare has reached a settlement with the state that will allow it to add up to five operating rooms at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport, including four before the end of August. The agreement with the state Office of Health Strategy (OHS) was posted Tuesday on the agency’s Certificate of Need Portal online. A certificate of need (CON) is required by state law when a hospital or healthcare organization seeks to make significant investments in new equipment or facilities, among other reasons. In its CON application, filed in October, Hartford HealthCare stated that St. Vincent’s, a 520-bed hospital located at 2800 Main St. in Bridgeport, currently has 15 functioning operating rooms but its license allows for 17. The hospital had planned to begin constructing two additional operating rooms, but that project was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. After the pandemic ended, St. Vincent’s completed a master facility plan to update its facilities and infrastructure, including modernizing and upgrading its operating rooms, the application stated. HHC acquired St. Vincent’s in 2019, giving the state’s second-largest health system its first hospital in Fairfield County. HHC proposed spending $14.25 million to redesign and build out the main operating room corridor at St. Vincent’s to bring the total number of ORs in use to 20, three more than currently authorized. Hospital officials said five of St. Vincent’s 15 operating rooms are too small to accommodate the equipment needed for complex orthopedic, thoracic and vascular surgical cases. Under the settlement agreement, HHC can add four operating rooms to the existing 15 “on or before Aug. 31, 2025, unless there is a delay due to Department of Public Health licensure processes, in which case (St. Vincent’s) will notify OHS” of the delay. The 20th OR cannot be opened, the agreement states, until “all 17 of (St. Vincent’s) non-special purpose, hospital-based ORs are collectively operating at or above 80% capacity for a period of six consecutive months.” The “non-special purpose” ORs refers to a separate requirement in the agreement for St. Vincent’s to designate two of the 20 ORs for special purposes — one for trauma surgical cases and one for cardiac thoracic surgical cases. The agreement also states that St. Vincent’s will not seek to add a 21st OR for at least three years. Bill Jennings, president of Hartford HealthCare's Fairfield Region, said the organization’s goal is to “to elevate the standard of care and to create a surgical destination hospital for all of New England, and we’ve done it.” He added that, with more complex cases, "there’s a significant demand for more staff, more equipment and more space. So these rooms are to accommodate the transformation of this hospital to a destination surgical hospital."