By: Deborah Johnson Wood
A $10 million state-of-the-art emergency room that will serve the main campus of Saint Mary’s Health Care at 200 Jefferson St. SE in Grand Rapids is an integral part of the $60 million Hauenstein Center neuroscience center currently under construction. Hospital administrators expect the new ER to open in January 2009.
At 34,000 square feet, the new ER is triple the size of the current ER and offers 44 private treatment rooms, a 64-slice CT scanner, digital X-ray and a clinical pharmacy with a retail pharmaceutical dispensing service.
“Patients needing prescriptions will be able to fill them before leaving the hospital,” says Michelle Pena, director of emergency, trauma and critical care services. “The private rooms will have walls and doors, no curtained walls, and a family zone with a TV and chairs so the family can be in the room with the patient.”
The entire ER is equipped with Emergin technology—software that talks to other systems within the ER, such as bedside cardiac monitors.
“Emergin receives information from the monitors to let the nurse know if their patient’s vitals have changed, for instance, their blood pressure has dropped or they’ve experienced heart arrhythmia,” Pena says. “The nurse gets the message on a phone they wear. Emergin also talks to the nurse call system. When the patient puts on their call light, the notification goes directly to their nurse’s phone; the nurse can use the phone to talk to the patient and see what they need.”
The parking deck roof will have a new helipad for helicopter transport of patients, the first helicopter service Saint Mary’s has had in a decade. Ambulance access is off Cherry Street. Other patients enter the ER from a drop-off area accessed from Jefferson Street.
The Hauenstein Center is expected to receive LEED certification.
Source: Michelle Pena, Saint Mary’s Health Care
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Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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