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Bucking
the Trend
Amid dire days for hospitals, a new community hospital bravely opens in Meriden
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Business New Haven
10/19/1998
By: Susan Banfield
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On September 29, just one day before the Hartford Courant carried a page 1 story headlined “Hospitals in State Facing Hard Times,” a brand new hospital opened its doors in Meriden.
While many hospitals around the state are losing money and struggling to survive, the new MidState Medical Center is a testament to the faith and determination of Meriden's residents and the new hospital's board. It was built on the premise that a hospital that is properly designed and equipped can defy the trends and thrive.
The Silver City has been home to a hospital for nearly 150 years: 99 years of Meriden-Wallingford Hospital, 37 years of World War II Veterans' Memorial Hospital, and seven years of Veterans Memorial Medical Center, with the latter two merging in 1991. However, the old VMMC, according to MidState's director of corporate communications James Shiels, was a “conglomeration of additions over the years that was totally inefficient and landlocked, with no space to add on or to start new on site.”
Residents of Meriden were unwilling, after so long, to do without a community hospital. Therefore, says Shiels, “For a hospital to be viable, the best way was to start all over.”
Before work on the new facility began, extensive research was undertaken to determine precisely what features were needed to make the a hospital economically viable.
National consultants were hired. Members of hospital committees traveled the nation looking at new facilities and making notes on what they had to offer. The result is a hospital that differs dramatically in a number of ways from most in Connecticut. These differences, it is hoped, will hold the key to MidState's financial viability.
The principal difference between MidState and the old VMMC - and from most older hospitals - is in its focus on outpatient care. At the time of its merger with Veterans' Memorial, Veterans Memorial Medical Center had a licensed capacity of 322 beds. The new MidState facility, by contrast, has only 94 inpatient beds.
The entire design of MidState Medical Center, in fact, is oriented toward outpatient service. There is ample parking - more than 800 spaces - and separate entrances for different types of service, such as cancer care, radiation therapy and maternity. There is also a medical office building, connected to the hospital, which houses physicians' offices. The hospital's outpatient orientation will allow it to take advantage of the trend, ushered in by managed care, away from costly inpatient care.
MidState also hopes that its state-of-the-art technology will be another key to financial success, helping to position it advantageously to recruit physicians. The new hospital boasts such features as “shadowless” lighting in its operating rooms, the most high-tech lighting available today; a computerization system more advanced than any in the state; state-of-the-art heart monitoring equipment supplied by Corometrics of Wallingford; and a new linear accelerator, used to deliver radiation therapy to cancer patients - one of just two such machines in the country.
Working in conjunction with the advanced technology is yet another strategy for financial viability: focusing on areas of specialization. The new equipment will make cardiology and cancer care two of MidState's specialties. Another will be maternity. The new hospital has 13 rooms in its Family Birthing Center that are designated “LDRP rooms” used for labor, delivery, recovery and post-partum care.
The new facility was designed to be as patient-friendly as possible, incorporating where possible preferences expressed in the extensive surveying done by members of the hospital committee. All inpatient rooms are private, with separate climate control and their own bath and shower.
(This also allows for maximum flexibility of bed control and thus the most efficient use of the 94 inpatient rooms. No bed need lie vacant, for example, because administrators don't want to put a teenager in the same room with an elderly terminal patient, or because they cannot put a woman in a room with a man.)
Kitchen facilities will allow patients to order food by the meal rather than a day ahead of time, and will permit them to be served when they want. Emergency care facilities are designed so that walk-in patients are not integrated with high-trauma patients such as gunshot victims.
Perhaps most notable: Although MidState is a city hospital, it is situated on 50 wooded acres (on Lewis Avenue, opposite Meriden Square Mall), lending it a tranquil, country-like environment. These features are all designed to attract both doctors and patients.
MidState has the same relationship with Hartford Hospital (or, properly speaking, with the corporation that owns Hartford Hospital) as the old VMMC. It, along with Hartford Hospital, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Hartford Healthcare Association.
This arrangement not only has service benefits for MidState - giving it access to technical and physician expertise it would not have otherwise - it has also has an important financial benefit. The new hospital cost $70 million. It was financed primarily through the sale of tax-exempt corporate bonds issued through the Connecticut Health & Education Facilities Authority (CHEFA). However, because Hartford Hospital backed the bond issue, “We got tremendous ratings on the bonds,” says Shiels.
“We have made good on our pledge to the community that they would be assured of a contemporary, first-class hospital to meet their needs well into the 21st century,” says MidState's president and CEO, Theodore H. Horwitz.
Shiels reports that after the first week of operation, the response of both doctors and patients to the new facility has been “overwhelming.” Perhaps this is a sign that the optimism of those who planned and designed MidState will be borne out, and that Meriden's new hospital will defy the odds and indeed be financially viable.
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