Sun Coast Hospital's expansion includes Web access for patients and digital X-rays.
By SHANNON TAN
Published October 18, 2004
LARGO - Watch television, listen to the radio and surf the Internet - without having to leave your emergency room bed.
Patients will be able to access those services when Sun Coast Hospital's new $3.1-million emergency room opens next year. The 10,000-square-foot emergency care department will almost double in size from 11 to 21 rooms.
Groundbreaking was Thursday, and construction will take about a year. The new emergency room will be partially open in June 2005 and fully operational in November 2005.
"By having a new emergency room with a much nicer environment, we should certainly see an increase in the utilization of the emergency room," said Larry Archbell, chief executive officer of Sun Coast Hospital.
Last year, the hospital treated 14,331 emergency patients and admitted about 40 percent of them for inpatient care.
Patients "want more room, they want more privacy," Archbell said.
"The emergency room used to be the emergency room," said Rick Wade, senior vice president of the American Hospital Association. Now "we don't take care of just emergencies. You have to have the ability to be the doctor's office, urgent care center, trauma room and where people go when they don't know where else to go."
Sun Coast Hospital's new emergency room will offer Patientline, a computer/television terminal that allows patients to check e-mail, use the phone and watch television. Physicians can also review lab work results and other patient information on the computer screen.
Using new wireless technology, ER staffers will be able to register patients at their bedside so there will be less of a wait in the waiting room.
The paperless environment will also allow physicians to access digital X-rays from several workstations instead of having to look at the actual X-ray films.
Generally, ER staffers take an hour to fill out paperwork for every hour of care, said Wade.
"Pieces of paper fall on the floor and get lost. You take time to fill them out," he said. "If you can create technology where you're dealing with less paper, it's not only a privacy issue, it's a speed issue."
The new emergency room also will have areas dedicated to treating patients with chest pain and pediatric patients.
The existing emergency room, which is 5,500 square feet, was built in the mid-1990s.
About 60 percent of hospitals nationwide need to replace aging facilities, a recent Hospitals & Health Networks survey found. Many hospitals are switching to private rooms, Wade said, because of new federal privacy rules.
Construction of hospitals rose from $10.18-billion in 2000 to $14.95-billion in 2003, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. More than 800 new hospitals are planned in the next several years, said consulting firm Reed Construction Data-RS Means. About 20 percent of those hospitals are concentrated in six states, including Florida and California.
That's because Florida's senior population is going to get larger. Aging baby boomers are projected to spend more than $1-trillion on health care, up from $200-billion in 2003, as advances in medical technology mean they can live longer with chronic illnesses.
The new facilities boast hotel-like amenities and technology such as wireless computing systems.
At Sun Coast Hospital, a new glass-enclosed waiting room in the ER will even offer wireless technology for patients and their caretakers to access the Internet on their PDAs or laptops. "It gives them something to do besides watch television," Archbell said.
