First patients arrive Monday at Capital Region expansion

An office furniture truck sits outside the new Capital Region Medical Center expansion wing Thursday afternoon as crews work diligently to furnish the hospitals new outpatient center in advance of Monday's opening.
An office furniture truck sits outside the new Capital Region Medical Center expansion wing Thursday afternoon as crews work diligently to furnish the hospitals new outpatient center in advance of Monday's opening.

Physicians will begin seeing patients Monday inside Capital Region Medical Center's (CRMC) 115,000-square-foot expansion in Jefferson City.

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Contributing Photographer

Volunteers in a focus group at an EcoFest planning meeting discuss ideas for recycling, waste and litter. They included Ginny England, clockwise from bottom left, Elizabeth Arnold, Erick McCarthy, Travis Young, Jennifer Richardson and Lillian Petrucelli.

Staff members with the Missouri Orthopedic Institute filed paperwork and unpacked boxes filled with medical and office supplies this week, preparing to open its doors on the second floor. The clinic, along with the retail pharmacy and gift shop (also on the second floor), will be the first facilities established inside the $37 million expansion. More clinics are scheduled to open in the expansion every Monday until mid-December.

Kathy Steinmeyer, the expansion move coordinator and director of patient experience and performance improvement, said moving into the expansion has been "three years in the making." It's a process that has "come in waves," she added, with the last major push happening throughout the past week. Deliverers unloaded large boxes filled with furniture Thursday outside the front of the expansion entrance, which will now act as CRMC's main entrance. What was known as the main entrance is now the west entrance.

Furniture installation, cleaning, staff training and information technology testing have been the focus leading to Monday's premiere. Steinmeyer said staff received safety training, including rapid response, response to call lights and code blues, fire evacuation and emergency preparedness. IT staff has been continuously setting up equipment, testing its system, conducting training and identifying any glitches with software and hardware. They will be on site during the Monday opening in addition to maintenance and facility crews, Steinmeyer said.

"We'll conduct punch list walk throughs," Steinmeyer said. "We'll walk through to identify small touch ups and (make sure) everything looks and works properly."

She led News Tribune staff on a tour of the expansion Thursday, starting with the main entrance. After patients and visitors park on covered or level parking, they will walk into the entrance, where an information desk will have employees on hand for assistance. Steinmeyer said if patients have questions regarding their appointments, the information desk can access clinic schedules and direct the patients to a clinic.

Another information desk is located on the second floor - one of the largest built in the expansion. The second floor information desk is located off the elevators and near what Steinmeyer called a "connecting corridor," a hallway that attaches the expansion and the main campus building.

The connectivity between the clinics and outpatient services presents advantages for both physicians and patients. Clinics will be moving out of facilities located off the main campus site and into the expansion, improving accessibility in a variety of ways.

"It is our true first experience of why we built this (expansion) in the first place - to have all of these convenient services in one location," Steinmeyer said. "The patient will be experiencing a clinic visit and an outpatient visit seamless to them."

Physicians not located on the main campus sometimes have to drive up to 20 minutes from their offices to the main campus, or vice versa, Kathy Wilbers, the second-floor manager, said. Because that travel time will be eliminated, she said she believes productivity will increase and patient wait times will lower.

"The physicians are excited about the location, so if they're seeing patients inside the hospital and making rounds, it's easy access to get to clinic," she said.

Patients can also anticipate greater efficiency in terms of testing - blood work, ultrasound, mammograms and X-rays. At the end of the second-floor corridors, patients, who are sometimes wearing hospital gowns, can enter a private space for testing. Though its located on the second floor, all floors have access to the space through the elevator system.

CRMC President Gaspare Calvaruso said the medical center's focus on the outpatient experience is nothing new, and the expansion is a reflection of that.

"When we looked at what our focus has been and where health care is going, it's in the outpatient setting," he said. "If you look at our business 5-6 years ago, it was predominantly inpatient services. Now, 70 percent of our business is outpatient and it's continuing to go that way because of innovations in technology and certainly things that have happened with Obamacare in trying to drive things to an outpatient setting. We feel like this is the right investment for our community. Again, it gets back to the patient experience and really trying to make it easy for them."

Wilbers, who currently supervises Capital City Medical Associates, said her office draws more than 100 blood labs daily that have to be transferred twice by couriers to the main campus for testing. In the expansion, pneumatic tube stations use suctioning (similar to that of a bank or pharmacy drive through) to send blood work from a clinic to the third-floor lab. Steinmeyer said this will better cycle times and prevent "bottle necking" from occurring at the lab.

CRMC also kept the patient experience in mind in more subtle ways. Stainless steel windows in the walls between the bathrooms and nurse lab processing stations allow patients to privately hand over feces or urine specimens. Privacy guards fully cover door cracks and new exam tables are hidden behind doors.

Lynne Voskamp, vice president of nursing services, said the nursing staff will enjoy the aesthetics of the new, bright space. Because clinics will be in close proximity, she added nurses will likely learn from one another, contributing to a higher moral.

"I think the teamwork that is created here too will help," Voskamp said. "We like to have people cross trained. I think having people in the same building will lend itself well to teamwork."

Internal medicine and Capital City Medical Associates will be the final clinics to move into the expansion, which is scheduled for Dec. 14.

Capital Region Medical Expansion move-in schedule

• Monday: Orthopaedics and the Missouri Orthopaedic Institute (MOI), pharmacy and gift shop, second floor

• Oct. 12: Therapy services, first floor

• Oct. 15: Coffee shop, second floor

• Oct. 19: Ear, nose and throat (ENT) and audiology, first floor

• Oct. 26: Neurology, first floor

• Nov. 2: Obstetrics/gynecology, third floor

• Nov. 9: Internal medicine, Mid-Missouri Medical Consultants, gastrointestinal, second floor

• Nov. 16: Pediatrics, first floor

• Nov. 23: Primary care, located on Edgewood, will move to the current obstetrics/gynecology clinic at 1014 Madison St.

• Nov. 30: Occupational medicine, first floor

• Dec. 7: General surgery and wound care, third floor

• Dec. 14: Internal medicine and Capital City Medical Associates, second floor