Jersey Shore’s $265M 10-story Hope Tower should keep you out of the hospital
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The hospital is nearing completion of the
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
"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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From the top floor of the new tower, the existing campus looks like a miniature
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
"The setting is just magnificent," said McGhee-Nuccio, 57, who has worked here for 30 years.
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Sable, 45, of
He met with the
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
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
Q:
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.
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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
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.
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