Lexington, KY - Inside the current University of Kentucky Emergency Room, patient beds line the cramped corridors of a sectioned-off and even piecemealed facility where there is no standardization between patient rooms.
All of that changes at 5 a.m. on July 14.
"It's like a Pinto versus a Cadillac," said Dr. Roger Humphries, Chairman of the university's Department of Emergency Medicine, about the ER's new three bay, eight bed Trauma Unit compared to what is currently in use. His statement, during a preview tour of the new ER faclity, was trumped by his boss, Dr. Michael Karpf, executive VP for Health Affairs who oversees UK Healthcare. "It's a Ferrari," Karpf said. "This is a sports model, this is a high-end sports model."
The new ER, phase one of what will be a 12-floor, $800 million medical center, has two distinct sides, one for adults and one for pediatric medicine with specialty rooms in each.
The pediatric ER has 10 standard rooms and two "crisis rooms" outfitted with high-tech bassinettes to care for infants in critical condition. It is completely separate from the adult side, yet wired to share its technologies.
The adult ER features 32 rooms, 20 of which are considered standard rooms with a capability on the 'head wall' above the patient's bed that's "more support than you'll have in almost anything other than an ICU," according to Karpf. The ER has four "crisis rooms" with hydraulic "power columns" that allow a doctor to move specialty equipment to any side of a patient who is undergoing cardiac trouble or any other type of dire emergency. There are four more secure rooms with blinds in-between panes of glass as well as other precautions for patients in need of a psychiatric evaluation, and four consultation rooms to be fed by a six bay "chair centric" room where patients needing lower level care can be seen and treated quickly.
"Rather than having beds in here, we'll just have loungers in here," Karpf said. "So if a patient comes in with something like a sore throat, and they think it is a problem where the patient could be taken care of real quickly, (it's) the idea to not even get them in to the back of the emergency room, but to get them through as quickly as possible. If those patients get caught up in the emergency room, they can get tied up for hours."
What appears in one room in the new ER appears in each of the other rooms like it, unlike the current facility where many of the rooms were retrofitted and equipment differs from room to room, according to Humphries. The layout of the new facility is designed to that the side of a patients room farthest from the door will have no medical equipment or supplies. That arrangement enables a family to be with their loved one and not have to move as a doctor or nurse goes about treating the patient.
Each room also has its own label maker, so patient information can be adhered to lab samples immediately after collection. While this may not rank among the higher tech advancements seen in the new department (like radio frequency tags on the staff that changes lights above doors so it is easy to tell who is in which room), Humphries said it will cut out one of a number of errors that can occur when there is just one centralized area where labels can be printed.
Even as the old ER winds down its days in service, Humphries is still able to utilize the type of technology that will be prevalent in the new facility as he can view MRIs, CT Scans and X-Rays digitally on his hospital provided iPad. The new facility will be 100 percent digital as all diagnostic imaging will go directly to computer screens.
One thing the new medical facility's designers have not figured out how to transfer digitally, however, is medication. As a result, three decidedly 20th Century pneumatic tubes have been installed in the ER.
Karpf said he anticipates an 8 percent to 10 percent increase in the amount of patients served in the new ER as the hospital as a whole is planning for 34,000 patients to come through its doors from July 1 through the end of June, 2011, up from 19,000 in FY03.
The rest of the hospital will open in phases over the next five to nine years - depending on revenue-based funding - with the main lobby, surgical waiting room, cafeteria, outdoor space and 305 seat auditorium slated to open in the first week of May, 2011.
Click here for a previous article about the new Albert B. Chandler Hospital as a whole.