Growth Merits Mercy?s Move

Susan Barrett waves her right hand toward the southeast corner of a $145 million hospital project under construction in Rogers, showing where St. Mary’s Chapel will sit upon the project’s completion.
“Over where that crane is, we wanted to bring the name with us out of respect for the Dominican Sisters [who founded St. Mary’s Hospital in 1950],” Barrett said.
The 1,000 SF, native stone chapel will be the only building with the name St. Mary’s on it when Mercy Health’s 350,000-SF complex is opened in January of 2008. The actual name of the new campus is undecided, but it won’t be called St. Mary’s any longer.
Despite moving from a community hospital to a regional health care provider for Benton County and beyond, Barrett, president and CEO of Mercy Health System of Northwest Arkansas, plans to keep the community feel while improving technology, logistics and, most importantly, patient privacy.
Stepping up the level of care was a necessity as St. Mary’s had outgrown its present facility in downtown Rogers. Suzanne Findley, the director of women’s and children’s services, said the hospital has delivered nearly 100 more babies in each of the last three years. She estimates that about 1,500 will be born at St. Mary’s this year.
So to meet the growing population and health care needs of Northwest Arkansas, the new facility will offer “world-class care” in cardiology, oncology, orthopedics, neurological, rehabilitation and outpatient services.
“We call it a transformation,” Barrett said. “We needed to do something substantial with bricks and mortar, but also something substantial with how we did business.”
It’s the answer to the questions Mercy’s local board of directors kept asking themselves around the turn of the century: “How do we remain relevant? What is it that we need to do in Northwest Arkansas to create a destination of health care?”
With 74.2 acres in the bustling “Pinnacle corridor,” a heartbeat away from Interstate 540, they had the ideal location to aid in increasing the hospital’s traffic and design the new facility with every attention to detail.
Barrett believes it will meet and exceed the needs of a booming population for the next 50 to 75 years.
“As the area grows, that primary care base has to expand and the specialty care lines have to be brought on,” Barrett said. “So this is a move to a different kind of medical community.”
St. Mary’s is a not-for-profit hospital, which means it has no individual shareholders and operating margins are reinvested into the local community to maintain facilities, build reserves, and support charity care as needed.
Of the projected cost of the new facilities, Mercy will fund about $105 million through operational gains and reserves while the remaining $40 million will come from a capital campaign that was conducted by St. Mary’s Hospital Foundation.
The foundation has achieved more than half of its goal with $25 million already raised.
Pledges to the foundation have come from a “Who’s Who” of Northwest Arkansas: J.B. and Johnelle ($5 million), Lee and Linda Scott ($1.25 million), Don and JoAnn Soderquist ($1 million), and even directly from corporate, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. ($5 million).
According to the most recent Medicare cost report, St. Mary’s had a $2.1 million loss in net income in the fiscal year ending June 30th. That’s down 133 percent from St. Mary’s $6.2 million surplus that was reported by Medicare in 2004.
An increase in charity care was the culprit.
Sisters of Mercy Health System, the parent to St. Mary’s, is based in St. Louis and has hospitals and clinics in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
Beds & Big Bucks
With 130 semi-private beds now, St. Mary’s sometimes has to pass patients on to other providers when it is at capacity. But there will be 200 private rooms in the new seven-story facility and the entire campus — which also includes a 120,000-SF physician office center — can expand to about 440 beds as needed.
“The thing that has me the most excited is the move to private rooms,” Barrett said.
The project began with a 72-acre donation from Evelyn Rife (in loving memory of her husband, John, who farmed the land for years) on the southeast corner of the New Hope Road and I-540 intersection in 1998. Another land donation from the Pete Walsh family completed the footprint for the new facility’s campus.
To put the donations into perspective, The Barber Group of Springdale recently purchased 56 acres within walking distance from the hospital’s campus for about $482,142 per acre. The same piece of property was purchased a year earlier for $319,642 per acre.
Centrally located between Rogers and Bentonville, Mercy should draw new patients from the Bella Vista area and northern Washington County. And its proximity to the accident-prone Interstate will bring in even more trauma patients than ever.
I See You
Every department will receive upgrades at the new facility — whether needed immediately or not.
“We still have the primary care that we have provided for years,” Barrett said. “But the technological side of it will be a substantial change.”
Perhaps, the coolest of the new gadgets is planned for the Intensive Care Unit, or ICU.
It will be a fail safe of sorts with an interactive link between the patient and a team of nurses and physicians in St. Louis. The first models of what is called the EICU (Electronic Intensive Care Unit) will be used in the current facility this winter in order to ready the staff for the new technology that includes a camera (about the size of a fist) and a two-way audio system.
But it won’t replace any staff. In fact, more positions likely will be added over time.
“It is another set of eyes and ears,” said David Wixson, Mercy’s projects manager. “If they want to look at the patient, the camera will swing down and they can talk directly to them.”
The virtual doctors can write orders for prescriptions and diagnose new symptoms as they occur with their own set of patient monitors. They can review what happened over the last hour, the last 12 hours, or the 24 hours.
And they’re on alert 24/7 along with the nurses at St. Mary’s.
So if a nurse is in another room when an alarm goes off, precious seconds won’t be lost. If it’s a late-night emergency and the doctor on call is on another floor, then the St. Louis physicians — who are licensed in Arkansas and have privileges at Mercy — can make educated decisions for treatment in a snap.
“Other than laying hands on the patient, they can do anything,” Wixson said.
Paper Jam
While saving lives, hospital administrators have also figured out how to save trees.
A “paperless” chart system throughout the hospital will be installed. It can be accessed through the Web, meaning doctors could even write orders between lining up putts.
“We have a big paper chart that is kept for years and years and years and we have to rent space to store them and then we have to go hunt for it,” Wixson said. “Now you won’t have to go find it, it will come to you.”
Medical error is the fifth-leading cause of death in the United States and it has been reported that 70 percent of those deaths are thought to be preventable, according to the Institute for Health Care Improvement.
Sometimes it’s because time was lost while other times the wrong medications or wrong dose was given, which the paperless charts would help prevent.
“The mission of the whole project is, patient safety is No. 1,” said Clark Ellison, the executive director of development for Mercy.
There will be no centralized nurses’ stations as there are now on each floor. Instead, nurses and physicians can review all the information they need about a patient on computer stations (some are even mobile) near each room.
“Doctors can enter that info into the computer that can be shared with the care-giving team in real time,” Ellison said. “Right now, all of that process is manual.”
No Logistical Limits
The layout of the new facility was designed with every detail in mind, especially when it comes to wheeling patients from department to department.
One of the chief logistical concerns at the current facility is the location of the helicopter-landing pad. It’s more than a football field’s walk across a bumpy parking lot to the front entrance.
Those patients are usually taken to the third floor to Charlotte Rankin, executive director of cardiovascular services. She runs the cardiac catheterization lab, the place where hearts are examined and crash carts are stocked with emergency medication and supplies.
“We’re really excited about that aspect of being closer to the [emergency department],” Rankin said. “But everything will be better located which will save a lot of time.”
Something that has her even more excited is in the planning stages for the cardiac center. It will be a digital monitor that will enable doctors to take families to a private conference center to show them exactly what procedure has been performed on a video screen.
“The family always wants to know, ‘Well, what do you mean by a stint?'” Rankin said. “And that’s actually going to come up and look like a movie of a chest film.”
Along those same lines, there will be a non-public area for people coming in by ambulance or helicopter. There also will be a non-public, covered area where cars can pull in for discharging patients.
The Nursery Room
If privacy is an issue for any patient, it’s usually when delivering a baby.
Now, there are five rooms reserved for labor, delivery and recovery, but the new hospital will have 18 rooms.
Those rooms can be used for the entire birthing process (labor, delivery, recovery, and postpartum), meaning mom doesn’t have to move from room to room throughout the process.
“We have the option of keeping people in one room for their whole experience, which some mothers may like and others may not,” Findley said. “But they won’t have to stay in the same room if they don’t want to. The big goal and most important thing that we stress is that St. Mary’s is all about choice.”
The women’s and children’s department will have many upgrades in technology and the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit also will be larger in square footage. There will two operating rooms on the floor instead of one, and the waiting areas at the end of each hall will have natural light coming through in an effort to make the experience enjoyable for all.
Staying Small-Minded
Findley and the rest of the department heads stressed that they’ve already established the reputation of providing optimal health care.
Now with the location of the new facility and advancements in technology, they hope to take that reputation to another level.
In the last quarter, St. Mary’s ranked in the top 94th percentile nationwide in patient satisfaction for obstetrician departments and in the top 99th percentile for pediatrics by Press Ganey & Associates, which reports customer satisfaction surveys.
“Now, we have the reputation and soon we’ll have the reputation and the newest hospital on the block,” Findley said.
The one thing they all agree should remain unchanged is the attitude of its employees, which makes a trip to St. Mary’s feel more like a big hug than a doctor’s visit.
“We treat our patients and their families a certain way that is special,” Rankin said. “I just hope we can continue to bring that feeling of warmth and compassion when people come in.”
St. Mary’s was awarded a 98 percent score on a scale of 100 by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, putting it in the top 12 percent of the nation’s hospitals.
Barrett insists the new hospital will have the same level — and even better — grades when it comes to patient’s satisfaction.
“That’s the spirit that will come with us,” Barrett said.
“Our people, our philosophy of care, our focus on health care as a ministry … those things will not change.”
Only the name will.

For more on Mercy Health CEO Susan Barrett, see Barrett Recalls Life-Changing Ride.