Jersey Shore’s $265M 10-story Hope Tower should keep you out of the hospital

April 30--NEPTUNE -- "This is a 100 percent outpatient facility," said Dr. Kenneth Sable, president of Jersey Shore University Medical Center.

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The hospital is nearing completion of the Hope Tower, a $265 million, 300,000-square-foot facility that will help it both consolidate and, it hopes, grow. The building will house departments including cancer care, pediatric services, maternity care, doctors offices and plenty of bells and whistles.

It is expected to open later this spring or early summer. And it comes as the health care industry finds itself in a position familiar to any business that is under pressure to be more efficient. Hospitals are turning to technology and trying to increase the number of patients they serve.

The result: Outpatient revenue in 2016 exceeded inpatient revenue for the first time. Outpatient space has grown by 10 percent in the past four years, while inpatient space has declined by 2 percent, according to a report by JLL Healthcare Capital Markets, a real estate company.

"With the advent of technology and lower cost settings of care, this trend is expected to continue uninterrupted," the authors said.

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Jersey Shore University Medical Center is an example. The hospital has 3,600 employees and $850 million in annual revenue. And it is considered a tertiary hospital that provides academic training and more specialized care that community hospitals don't provide.

From the top floor of the new tower, the existing campus looks like a miniature Hollywood movie set. You can see the original 1932 hospital, then called Raleigh Fitkin-Paul Morgan Memorial Hospital. You can see the sleeker more recent expansion from 2009. And you can see the doctors' offices up and down Corlies Avenue.

The landscape has changed.

The hospital's infusion center, which treats patients receiving chemotherapy and other intravenous drugs, has seen the number of patients increase by 2 percent a year for the past several years, officials said, outgrowing its space that has 11 chairs and a staff of 23.

The new center is on a sunlit floor with 33 plush chairs and perhaps seven more employees, said Joanne McGhee-Nuccio, the assistant nurse manager of the infusion center. Nurses, social workers and nutritionists will be housed together, helping to coordinate care.

"The setting is just magnificent," said McGhee-Nuccio, 57, who has worked here for 30 years.

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Sable, 45, of Monroe Township, has been president since January 2015, just a few months before Jersey Shore University Medical Center broke ground on the tower. Back then, the tower had been in the planning stages for a decade. Obamacare was 5 years old. And telemedicine was rare.

He met with the Asbury Park Press on a crystal-clear day last week to offer a tour and talk about the role he thinks Hope Tower will play in the community's health care.

Question: What's going on in health care that is driving this project?

Sable: Hope is an acronym for Healing Outpatient Experience. If you've been around, (you've) seen what's gone on with the development of Jersey Shore through the years. The Northwest Pavilion, which opened in 2010, was the transformation project. What that did was add a new bed tower to the campus. Since that time, the Hope Tower project has really become transformation project 2.0. So moving all of our outpatient services into this state-of-the- art, brand new building for the community is really what drove the development.

Q: The big trend seems to be to keep people out of the hospital. How did that factor into how this building was designed?

Sable: More and more we are moving towards outpatient services. It's a little different at our institution because being a tertiary academic medical center, taking care of the high-end acuity, we're actually seeing we don't have as much of that here. We are seeing certain services move towards outpatient. But what we are seeing is our inpatient wards are becoming much more critical care in nature.

The other big thing is, we're talking about care coordination. You can imagine when you have practices scattered up and down, throughout the region and highways around here, it's sometimes hard to coordinate care. Now, practices are located adjacent to each other. One floor up, one floor down. That allows a much more streamlined coordination of care.

Q: What do you hope the impact will be for the community?

Sable: The impact ... is to show the community that we are here for them, to show the community we are investing in the best quality, the best doctors, nurses, staff people that we can find, to provide the best quality services close to home so they don't have to travel (to New York City or Philadelphia).

Q: The Leapfrog Survey was released recently. The watchdog group grades hospitals twice a year based on quality measures. Jersey Shore University got an A for the first time since the fall of 2015. How important is that?

Sable: We initiated a systemwide journey starting in 2016 to become a high-reliability organization, otherwise known as an HRO. The principals of high-reliability organizations are about transparency of culture and safety throughout the organization, empowering any team member at any level to be able to, we call it, "stop the line," to borrow a phrase from the auto industry, if they see a patient safety risk.

We actually measure our improvements in lives saved. Not just dots on a graph, but lives saved. And we've saved 143 lives throughout the organization in the two years we've run this high-reliability organization journey.

More: Patient safety: What grade did your hospital get?

Q: How is technology changing the hospital's operation?

Sable: We already do telestroke here. As a network we are exploring using telehealth for a variety of different purposes. I personally believe that telehealth is the future. Just as we do banking on our phones and I order Dunkin' Donuts on my phone and I show up and pick it up, health care will be the same. People will say, "Well, you have to go and be examined." Well, technology is so good you can use your phone with the right adapter to be an EKG machine, you can use your phone as a stethoscope. Also the addition of all the wearables, the wearable technology can monitor your heart rate, your blood pressure. All those things together can be transferred in real time to your physician while you see them through a video conference call.

Q: What will the impact of technology be on the new tower?

Sable: There's always going to be, especially for things like infusion and imaging, those things need to be in person. But with the demand the way it is, we hope to expand our telehealth offerings. The other benefit is, it expands your market share potential beyond just your local region. So If you can provide great telehealth services, you can see patients from California, from Alaska, from around the world if you have specialists that are proficient in certain areas.

Michael L. Diamond; @mdiamondapp; 732-643-4038; [email protected]

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