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88 °F Forecast | Road Cams Monday, August 2, 2004 Today's News | Classifieds | Autos | Homes | Jobs | Tempo | Health | Community | Home Delivery SECTIONS Home Page Local News Sports Business Obituaries Life Opinion - Politics Tempo AP News Weather Classified Archives Site Map SPECIAL SECTIONS Since We Asked Outdoor Journal Prime Times Wellness Connection Readers' Choice Real Estate Showcase Joy Magazine Homelife Magazine Wedding Guide Rogue Valley's Finest EXTRA Newspaper in Education Personals Movie Times TV Times E The People MARKETPLACE Find a Car Find a Home Find a Job Classifieds Place an ad eSouthernOregon Automotive Communities Entertainment Publications Recreation Calendar CUSTOMER SERVICE Frequent Questions Advertising Information Home Delivery Employment Contact Us Media Kit Network Affiliate Oregon Road Conditions & Cams Email Story to a Friend August 1, 2004 The new reception area of the Emergency Department at Providence Medford Medical Center is reflected in a ceiling mirror. The department will grow from 11 exam rooms to 26 as part of a larger hospital expansion to meet growing demand for medical services Mail Tribune / Jim Craven A Providential shift Providence Medford Medical Center prepares today for tomorrow’s population Stories by BILL KETTLER Mail Tribune More of everything. The old chain-store marketing slogan could just as easily describe Providence Medford Medical Center’s plans for the future. More babies. More seniors. More surgeries. More broken legs and sliced fingers and trips to the emergency room. More colonoscopies and diagnostic tests. More cancer. People who study population trends expect Southern Oregon to add as many as 40,000 new residents over the next 10 to 15 years, lured to Jackson and Josephine counties by outstanding natural beauty and a quality of life that’s increasingly hard to find. Young or old or somewhere in between, they all will have medical needs. Providence Medford plans to be ready for the new arrivals. Over the next four years, the hospital plans to add up to 100 new patient beds, double its emergency capacity and build a new outpatient surgery center on its 22-acre campus. Advertisement Providence’s cross-town neighbor, Rogue Valley Medical Center, is building, too. Two years ago, RVMC started an expansion and remodeling project that will cost more than $100 million before it’s completed. Population growth in general — and the region’s burgeoning senior population in particular — is driving the Providence expansion, says Chuck Wright, chief executive officer for the Providence Health System in Southern Oregon. Wright says nearly half of the newcomers will be high users of hospital services. Research suggests one in four will be over age 65; 17 percent will be age 45 to 64. "Our intent is to capture our fair share of the demand," Wright says. "Our intent is to grow with the community." The project also will double the size of Providence’s BirthPlace. Hospital managers hope to increase their share of the maternity market because six Medford obstetrician/gynecologists recently left private practice to join the Providence team. Details of the expansion plan are still in flux, but in general terms the project includes a four-story "patient care tower" with three floors of patient beds; a parking garage with 400 to 600 spaces; and the expanded emergency department, maternity center and outpatient surgery center. The final price tag for buildings and equipment may well exceed $60 million. Wright said Providence will spend $20 million in 2005 for the emergency department, maternity center and new medical equipment. A parking garage of the scale planners envision could cost $11 million; the bed tower, $27 million, says Mike Strasser, Providence’s assistant administrator for fiscal services. Hospital construction costs do not necessarily include the expenses of equipping new patient rooms with medical equipment. Wright says the hospital will finance the project with internally generated savings, a fund-raising campaign and money borrowed from its parent organization, Providence Health System. PHS, overseen by the Sisters of Providence, includes hospitals and clinics in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska. "The Sisters have been very conservative in building," Wright says. "They don’t like to borrow money. We try to grow from internally generated capital." The new emergency department could be finished as soon as fall 2005. Construction of the four-story bed tower could begin in 2007, on the parking lot in front of the hospital’s main entrance. Final sites for the outpatient surgery center and the parking garage haven’t been chosen, Wright says. Planners want to preserve as much greenery as possible on the hospital grounds. "We have no desire to pave any more of our campus," he says. The emergency department will expand on a parking lot adjacent to the existing structure and grow from its present 11 exam rooms to 26. The rooms will be larger and have doors instead of curtains to give patients more privacy. Each room will be equipped with a television to help patients and family members pass the time when a doctor can’t get to them as quickly as they might like. The televisions might seem like a luxury, but hospital planners are trying to increase both capacity and amenity to attract patients, says Dr. Ken Brown, emergency services medical director at Providence. "You want to develop your ED," Brown says. "That’s where lots of people will meet (the hospital)." Wright says the hospital needs an ambulatory surgery center to accommodate the growing demand for medical procedures that can be done without overnight hospitalization. The surgery center could be built in 2006, on space presently occupied by parking lots. As parking lots disappear under buildings, Providence will need to build a parking garage to make up for the space lost on the ground. The garage could be three or four floors, depending on the design that architects eventually choose. The project will give Providence its first new patient rooms since 1977, when it added 75 rooms to its original 93. Some of the floor space will be walled in and left unfinished, to be transformed into patient rooms as demand warrants. Wright says the expansion will put Providence in a position to grow along with the community. "Health care is a very personal issue," he says. "We are growing to meet our customers’ needs and provide them with the opportunity to make their decision based on service, quality and price." Reach reporter Bill Kettler at 776-4492, or e-mail [email protected] Hospitals must build often Visit any hospital these days, and you’re likely to see construction work in progress. Hospitals across the United States are building new rooms and expanding services to prepare for a tide of baby boomers — just like Medford’s two hospitals. "Hospitals are being forced to expand to meet consumer expectations," says Joyce Berger, a consultant for Healthtech, a San Francisco-based health-care planning group. "The exact same thing is happening here," Berger says, noting that big metropolitan hospitals are converting double-patient rooms to single occupancy, expanding their emergency departments to cut down waiting time and offering services that cater to middle-aged and senior patients. To some extent, patient expectations drive the building boom, Berger says. "It’s the whole boomer phenomenon," she explains. "They say, ‘We’re important. We want what we want; and we want superior quality at reasonable prices, and we want it now.’" Hospitals increasingly feel a need to serve both their external customers (patients) and internal customers (physicians, nurses and staff), says Leonard Friedman, associate professor of public health at Oregon State University. Berger agrees, noting that new operating rooms, better nursing stations and the latest medical technology all help hospitals recruit and retain the staff they need, especially when doctors and nurses are in short supply. "They’re going to want to work at the nicest place with the best technology and the happiest patients," she says. When hospitals grow, patients often have more choices and a broader range of services, but those enhancements can be expensive. Berger and Friedman say an "arms-race" mentality can develop when one hospital in a market decides to expand. Other hospitals have to expand, too, to remain attractive to patients, doctors and nurses. "You need to appear legitimate in the eyes of your patients, your physicians and your community," Friedman says. Building costs inevitably are passed on to consumers, says Trish Anderson, a partner in Phoenix Health Care Consulting of Los Angeles. "That cost is borne by the non-Medicare population," Anderson says, both in higher health-insurance premiums and in higher hospital bills for people who don’t have insurance. People who have health insurance often fail to connect their own personal medical choices with higher medical costs, Friedman says. "We don’t purchase health care directly," he notes. "We don’t see the costs as immediately or drastically as we do in any other business." "The sticker shock comes every year when health-insurance premiums go up 10 or 15 or 25 percent." Reach reporter Bill Kettler at 776-4492, or e-mail [email protected] Hospitals face challenges looking 10-20 years ahead Hospital planners face a nearly impossible task. They have to forecast community medical needs 10 or 20 years down the road, anticipate changes in medical technology, and all the while strive to protect or enhance their share of the health-care market. Providence Health System (Providence Medford’s parent organization) works on a three-year strategic planning cycle, says Mary Stoneman, a senior planning associate for PHS. Stoneman says the Providence system in the past focused much of its energy and resources on its four Portland-area hospitals, but managers have recognized "a need to grow in other communities if we’re going to succeed. Medford is a good growth market." Rogue Valley Medical Center managers say there’s ample projected demand to support growth at all three Jackson County hospitals (including Ashland Community Hospital), but they’re troubled by the possibility that Providence might try to offer services that are now available exclusively at RVMC. "The trick is not to take competition to a level where we’re splitting care," says Scott Kelly, vice president for planning, marketing and business development at Asante Health System, RVMC’s parent company. Kelly says the region that both hospitals serve doesn’t have enough people to warrant duplicating expensive services such as RVMC’s neonatal intensive-care unit. "The community need just isn’t there to justify that," he says. Providence plans to double the size of its BirthPlace maternity center, but has not made any decisions about whether to build a neonatal intensive-care unit. The hospitals cooperate in some areas. They share trauma patients by taking trauma calls on alternate days, and RVMC agreed to share revenue from cardiac surgeries when Providence agreed not to build its own cardiac-care center. Reach reporter Bill Kettler at 776-4492, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life Opinion - Politics | AP News | Archives | Site Map E Southern Oregon | Classified Copyright © 1997-2004 Mail Tribune. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions Website Feedback ADVERTISERS A D V E R T I S E R S RESOURCES Oregon Road Conditions & Cams SPECIAL SECTIONS Auto Finder Job Finder Home Finder Joy Magazine Homelife Magazine Tempo Readers' Choice Real Estate Showcase Since We Asked Food for Thought Wellness Connection Outdoor Journal Moving to Southern Oregon? Volunteer Opportunities Prime Times