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Health and medicine

New heart hospital wired for paperless records

Pepin Heart Hospital, which opens to patients in February, aims to be a leading heart facility.

By LISA GREENE
Published December 28, 2005

TAMPA - Nothing covered the concrete floor but construction scars, and the furniture had yet to arrive. But the empty rooms gave one clue of their future as part of Pepin Heart Hospital & Dr. Kiran C. Patel Research Institute: a long row of electrical outlets and cable hook-ups.

Outside in the hallway, near the patient rooms, were more outlets. From here, computers will allow doctors to check patients' records or view X-rays and diagnostic tests.

"Our goal here is we're getting away from the paper medical records," said Brigitte Shaw, Pepin's chief executive officer, as she stood in the dusty hallway, raising her voice to be heard over the whine and bang of nearby construction. "We'll have computer devices along the corridors."

The $50-million hospital, on the Fletcher Avenue campus of University Community Hospital, will start accepting patients on Valentine's Day. Hospital officials plan on a quiet start-up, gradually moving UCH's heart patients to the new one.

They are less quiet about their ambitions.

"We're aspiring to be one of America's leading heart hospitals," Shaw said. "We want to become the knowledge people for cardiovascular care."

Both Shaw and Norm Stein, president and chief executive officer of University Community Health, say they want Pepin to become as well-known for heart disease as nearby H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute is for cancer.

They have a way to go. Pepin will open as a 125,000-square-foot facility licensed for 125 beds. Moffitt, licensed for 162, has a sprawling campus of more than 1-million square feet. It has become one of a few dozen cancer centers designated as such by the federal government and in recent years became ranked as one of the nation's top cancer centers.

This doesn't bother Stein. He remembers when Moffitt opened its doors in 1986.

"I thought, "Wow. What are they trying to do?"' he said.

Although other area hospitals have established heart programs, including Tampa General, St. Joseph's and Morton Plant, Tampa Bay's aging population needs more options for heart treatment, Stein said.

UCH has designed Pepin in cooperation with GE Healthcare. It will have the latest diagnostic equipment and all its records stored electronically. Hospital officials want the facility to be nearly paperless.

Electronic records and equipment will include computers at each patient's bedside. Flat screens will swing out from the wall.

Doctors will be able to use these computers to prescribe new drugs while talking to the patient. They also will be able to pull up the patient's X-rays or other images and show them to the patient.

The screens will come with a wireless keyboard that patients can use in bed to surf the Internet, check e-mail and order hospital meals. The computers include TVs, movies and video games. They'll also store programs on different types of heart conditions and treatments for patients to watch.

The building includes an atrium in the center and a library, coffee bar, gift shop and chapel around the edges.

The south side will house patient rooms on the first floor, diagnostic facilities on the second and operating suites on the third. The layout is designed to reduce noise in patient hallways.

Hallways and lab space on the second floor are still unfinished. Inside the labs, cardiac catheterization units already have been installed.

But for now, the most important work is going on next door. Hospital and GE staffers are training doctors, nurses and other workers how to use the new technology.

"You can't go overnight from a paper environment to an electronic world," Shaw said. "Implementation is key."

In fact, some other hospitals that have tried to introduce electronic records systems failed because doctors found the systems difficult to use.

Dona Brook, a clinical nurse informaticist at the new center, says Pepin's system will make doctors' jobs easier.

"We'll get to the point where physicians can enter their information from home" via computer, she said.

The hospital plans to have CNN commentator Larry King as the keynote speaker at a preopening event next month.

[Last modified December 28, 2005, 00:36:14]