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Hospitals expand to meet growing needs
By Rachel Pleasant
Staff Writer
Ask a hospital administrator or the state officials charged with signing off on hospital construction, and they will tell you that no two projects are the same. That is certainly the case for the three projects in the works in the Charleston area. Here is a look at each.
Roper St. Francis Healthcare
Roper St. Francis Healthcare sees a disparity in the Charleston area, and it wants to do something about it.
Roper St. Francis estimates that 69% of hospital beds in the Charleston area are located on the peninsula, where less than 10% of the area’s population resides. Only 5% of beds, meanwhile, are located in Mount Pleasant, where 21% of the area’s population resides.
According to the state Office of Research and Statistics, if growth continues at the current rate, by the year 2010, the population of Mount Pleasant will reach an estimated 67,000 residents, up from 56,340 in 2004.
Growth at that rate is one Roper St. Francis can’t overlook.
“The numbers are already there. The need is there now, and it’s going to grow,” said Margaret Mullins, spokeswoman for Roper St. Francis. “People are not going to stop moving to Mount Pleasant any time soon. We want to go where the people are.”
Seeing the growing pool of potential patients across the Cooper River, Roper St. Francis Healthcare, which already operates Roper St. Francis Medical Center at the intersection of Long Point Road and Interstate 526, recently submitted a certificate of need application with the state.
Roper’s plan outlines the building of a 250,000-square-foot, 85-bed acute care hospital in the Carolina Park development, located at the intersection of Highway 17 North and Faison Road, eight miles from East Cooper Regional Medical Center’s proposed project.
The 85 beds slated for the Mount Pleasant project, which is pegged at $90 million, will be transferred from Roper Hospital in downtown Charleston.
The new hospital will offer 24-hour emergency care, women’s services, inpatient and outpatient surgery, intensive and critical care, imaging, a laboratory and a pharmacy.
Roper St. Francis should receive a decision on its certificate of need early next year and estimates that construction will take between four and five years.
In addition to its Mount Pleasant project, Roper St. Francis is also building a heart and vascular center in downtown Charleston, which is scheduled to open in 2006.
East Cooper Regional Medical Center
At East Cooper Regional Medical Center, the need for more room is seen in the hospital’s waiting areas and parking lots every day.
“We’re two years into the very definite need for expansion due to the request for services,” said Andrea Wozniak, ECRMC’s president and CEO. “At times, there are not enough beds. Definitely, the emergency room often exceeds its space on weekends and evenings. The radiology department has no waiting space. Every non-clinical service we can move—the business office, medical records, accounting—is out of here.”
Additionally, Wozniak said, the hospital’s electrical system is running at capacity. Were the existing facility to be expanded, it would cost millions of dollars to upgrade the necessary systems, she said.
The answer ECRMC has come up with is to replace its current building, located at 1200 Johnnie Dodds Blvd. in Mount Pleasant, with a new structure to be located on an adjacent site.
ECRMC has filed a certificate of need application with the state, asking for the go-ahead to build the new hospital.
Plans call for a 140-bed hospital, which would increase the hospital’s bed count by 40.
Future plans include further expansion, including another 100 beds, and possibly a 160-bed psychiatric hospital and a 100-bed rehabilitation hospital.
The new building would be nearly
80 feet tall, allowing the hospital to separate services by floor and reduce the number of exits, a move the hospital argues will increase security.
The new building will also position nurses’ stations closer to patient rooms, eliminating the sometimes long walks back and forth.
ECRMC anticipates receiving its certificate of need from the state in January or February and hopes to break ground in June. If all goes according to schedule, the new facility would be open in 2009.
The existing facility will be used for a complementary service, possibly long-term care.
Medical University of South Carolina
The Medical University of South Carolina is well into an expansion designed to improve its efficiency.
A 641,000-square-foot, seven-story, $154 million hospital is currently under construction and is scheduled to be open for use by late 2007.
The new building will house 156 beds, enough room to relocate both the cardiovascular and digestive disease centers to the building; a logical move, said Chris Malanuk, director of strategic planning and director of hospital replacement.
“Both digestive diseases and cardiovascular diseases require much of the same ancillary support,” Malanuk said, referring to things such as laboratory services, and because the two concentrations complement one another, the building will operate at a high level of efficiency.
By relocating digestive and cardiovascular services to the new building, room will be made to expand other services, Malanuk said.
MUSC is also building a 52,000-square-foot, $36 million energy complex that will be able to deliver chilled water, steam and electricity to the entire hospital.
“It will make things much more efficient and will pay off significantly,” Malanuk said. “If we didn’t have a central energy plant, for instance, we would require another floor in the new hospital building for energy equipment.”
The central energy complex, scheduled to begin operating in the spring, will also be able to handle any future expansions, which are being discussed but have not been finalized.
“We have been in discussions with (the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center) about forming a joint building that would improve services for both of us,” Malanuk said.
Rachel Pleasant is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at rpleasant@charlestonbusiness.com.
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