On Feb. 22, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center plans to move approximately 400 patients into its new 26-story hospital tower, making it the largest facility patient move in the U.S. this year.
In a Feb. 4 morning interview with Becker’s, Chief Clinical Officer Andrew Thomas, MD, said the Columbus-based system is 17 days, 21 hours, 17 minutes and 15 seconds away from opening the 820-bed University Hospital.
He did not rattle off this timeline off the top of his head — he only looked to his right, where a countdown clock sits on a windowsill. When Dr. Thomas and his colleagues got countdown clocks for the hospital’s planned opening, the clocks read “444 days.”
The $2 billion project idea began much earlier — about a decade ago, according to Dr. Thomas. OSU Wexner Medical Center, a seven-hospital system, needed more clinical capacity as the population of Central Ohio is projected to significantly increase by 2050.
The population of Franklin County, which includes Columbus, is projected to increase 12.39%, from 1.32 million people in 2020 to 1.49 million by 2050, according to U.S. census data. To the north, Delaware County is expected to increase by 53.6%, from about 214,000 residents to nearly 330,000.
To care for the growing population, University Hospital will have 820 private patient rooms, including 234 ICU beds and about 150 new beds added to OSU Wexner’s cancer program. The top three floors of the 26-story tower are dedicated to maternity care.
The tower is physically connected to existing OSU Wexner care spaces previously named Rhodes Hall, Doan Hall and the Brain and Spine Hospital. Because the spaces are contiguous, the patient transfer will be entirely indoors.
That solves one potential issue, as Columbus is projected to average 45 degrees on Feb. 22. But the system is preparing for another possible complication: Keeping patients stable during transfer.
To keep patients safe, OSU Wexner designed “patient transport highways” to move each patient to their assigned room, according to Dr. Thomas. Along the way, there will be first-aid stations and rooms set aside in case someone becomes short of breath or has a sudden drop in blood pressure.
“To get it done in eight hours, we’ll be moving one patient every 53 seconds into the building,” he said. “So it’s a very well coordinated [plan].”
Dr. Thomas, who has been with the academic medical center since 1991, said the project has been “one of the most energizing and gratifying projects” he has ever worked on.
“Not many times you can look back over a 10-year span and point to something that is going to impact the lives of so many people, whether they work here, go to school here, or [are] the patients and their families that we take care of,” he said. “It’s been an amazingly wonderful process.”
That process has included an “incalculable” number of decisions, Dr. Thomas said, ranging from where to store items to new processes for responding to code blues.
Since October, OSU Wexner has orchestrated three dress rehearsals wherein hundreds of clinical staff walked through the tower to check on spaces and run scenarios.
The system has trained thousands of people on navigating the facility, which spans nearly 2 million square feet. University Hospital is designed differently from other parts of OSU Wexner, which were built between the 1950s and ’80s, Dr. Thomas said.
It also features more patient-facing technology, such as 75-inch TVs and Care.ai, a camera system OSU Wexner will use for clinical observation and virtually connecting patients with their families. With these features and every patient room outfitted with a 9-foot window, the tower is significantly different from what was built in the 20th century.
“When we move out of Doan Hall, it’ll be 75 years old,” Dr. Thomas said. “I can only hope this building will still be relevant [and] working 75 years from now.”
