Despite all the building, the number of medical/surgical beds, including beds designated for heart care, isn’t expected to change much, even after Miami Valley Hospital and Kettering Medical Center finish their additions next year.
That number actually declined from 1,436 to 1,409 in the last five years, according to the Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association.
Good Sam, for example, netted 14 more beds for heart care through its renovation. That doesn’t include the loss of 47 beds with the closing last month of Dayton Heart Hospital, which became part of Good Sam.
Miami Valley Hospital plans no increase in beds dedicated to heart care, though two stories that will remain unfinished in its new addition could accommodate future growth of cardiac-related services.
Kettering Medical Center, meanwhile, isn’t supplementing the 30 beds it dedicates to inpatient heart care, but is adding 20 “short-term stay” (23-hour observation) beds, said Ron Landau, the hospital’s cardiac services director.
Miami Valley Hospital’s new addition means virtually all semi-private rooms in the main hospital eventually can go private, said Mary Boosalis, Miami Valley Hospital’s president/CEO. Of the main hospital’s 579 adult beds, 54 percent are currently semi-private.
“The standard of care in the industry has moved to private rooms,” she said. “That’s the way health care has evolved ... . You have to be able to compete.”
Private rooms mean less infection risk and more efficiency, Boosalis said. Patients typically transfer rooms four to six times during a hospital stay, but private rooms should reduce that number to one or two.
She declined to say how much the hospital expects to save from those efficiencies and those derived from consolidating cardiac-related services in the 484,000-square-foot addition.
Kettering Medical Center’s cardiac care department expects efficiencies from consolidation and technology will shave its operating budget 3 percent to 10 percent, keeping the project “budget-neutral,” Landau said.
Boosalis and Landau said there are no plans to make patients pay more at their respective hospitals to offset construction costs. Boosalis noted insurance reimbursement rates are locked in for several years. Facility upgrades are part of the cost of doing business, she said.
Bryan Bucklew, GDAHA’s executive director, said those using hospital systems eventually bear construction costs in some form.
“The cost would be indirect, but I don’t think it would be inaccurate to say that people in the Dayton region are impacted by the facility decisions that the hospitals make,” he said.
Still, he said, the community receives a good return on that investment. Any excess hospital revenue is reinvested in the community, often in the form of state-of-the-art facilities that often mean shorter hospital stays with fewer complications — and less of a need to leave town for medical care, he said.
Amidst the debate about overhauling health care, doctors, hospitals and other medical facilities have come under fire for performing too many unnecessary procedures in areas such as heart care, creating waste in the system.
Bucklew acknowledges room for improvement in that area. But he said tort reform and electronic medical records can reduce defensive and duplicative medicine, respectively.
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