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When our team was formed to create a new hospital for the people of Maple Grove and surrounding communities in the northwest suburbs of Minneapolis, MN, we faced some significant challenges. We were building a new healthcare facility in the midst of very difficult economic conditions. There was strong competition from existing providers. And the country was looking with increased intense scrutiny at both healthcare expenditures and patient satisfaction.
 We were determined to be a premier healthcare provider, focusing on the needs and expectations of our customers. To succeed, we knew we'd have to set ourselves apart from other hospitals in the area, becoming a facility that patients would come to because of our reputation. Building a new facility, organization and culture from the ground up afforded us some advantages.
Maple Grove Hospital is a collaborative effort between long-standing Minneapolis-area healthcare providers North Memorial Healthcare and Fairview Health Services. This partnership provided us with an established support structure, including access to subject matter experts from both organizations.
However, rather than model the facility based on a template from either partner organization, we planned and designed from the ground up. During our 5-year planning period, we invested time in design strategies that would make it easier to anticipate and solve problems, work more efficiently and provide our patients with exceptional service at a competitive cost.
This included the unusual step of creating mock room layouts in a vacant warehouse to help design the rooms for ideal workflow for nurses, doctors and staff, allowing us to make design changes at the lowest possible cost. During construction, we built one of each room type in the actual facility, then completed one last round of reviews and mock events to fine-tune our design. The goal for these facility and process designs was to allow caregivers to spend more time taking care of patients and less time on unnecessary or inefficient tasks.
Aside from the new building, we knew one of our differentiators would be the culture we created among our staff and providers. Our staff was recruited and selected based on an awareness of and shared commitment to our goals, capabilities and philosophies.
New Technology = Quiet Hospital
As we were creating our new facility, we put considerable thought into communications technology and focused on making investments with both short-term value and long-term flexibility. The result is an amazingly quiet hospital with excellent communications capabilities. Patients and visitors hear no intercoms, overhead paging messages for doctors, or announcements that an emergency is underway, yet staff are continuously exchanging the right information efficiently.
Right Messages for the Right Caregivers
Our hospital supports its premise of getting the "right message to the right person at the right time" through the use of middleware from Amcom Software. Each patient has a bedside control unit with simple buttons for water, toilet assistance or pain. Pressing a button delivers a message directly to the appropriate caregiver; water or toilet messages to the aide and pain messages directly to the nurse. With the use of this middleware, we're also able to take clinical system alerts and send a message to the right caregiver on his or her communication device.
Here's how it works: Each employee wears a Vocera communication badge, allowing them to receive alerts from our Rauland-Borg nurse call or Philips patient monitoring system, and to then respond. Staff members can also connect with each other via the same devices. To do so, they simply press a button and speak the name of the person (or the role, such as "ED charge nurse") they want to reach. Any group or individual can be contacted immediately, without everyone in the building hearing the request.
Because of this approach, we can reach any staff member or part of the medical team, wherever they are, or reach someone else who's been designated in their place, without having to look up or memorize phone numbers.
Technology & Patient Safety
Technology also contributes to increased patient safety. A "code blue" button is available in each room. If a nurse presses the button, an emergency message goes out to the response team. Also, if a patient is not supposed to get out of bed alone, but tries to get up, our system immediately notifies the nurse.
Much of the technology is designed to make the nurse's day more productive and allow for more time at the bedside, not spent on time-consuming tasks, such as tracking down supplies. Small LCD screens, located in each room, are programmed with buttons to initiate messages appropriate to the particular care area. Nurses can use these screens to, for instance, order replenishment of supplies stored in the room's dedicated storage area. The Amcom system relays that message to someone in supplies who then replenishes.
The in-room TV sets, too, have a place in patient care. The high-definition televisions greet patients by name when they turn it on. Educational programming and hospital information are available on demand, tailored to the patients in different units. Soon, the TVs will also gently remind patients to watch videos specific to their condition before leaving and record all education viewed in the room in the patient's electronic medical record.
Electronic Medical Records
Of course, technology enhancements go beyond communications. Medical records are also computerized. Prescription drugs are barcoded and computerized. Each patient also has a barcoded wristband. Before administering medication, the nurse scans the patient's wristband and the medication. This directs a quick check, verifying that, for this patient, the right medication at the right dose is being administered at the right time, virtually eliminating medication errors. Staff scheduling and nurse-to-patient assignments are also managed via computer systems.
We've planned, designed and built a facility we're all very proud of. But we're most proud of recent patient satisfaction scores that put our hospital in the top 5 percent nationally for "willingness to recommend," which is a key indicator of patient satisfaction. That's a great testament to the care model we developed and to our staff. However, more importantly, it is a challenge to us all to improve upon these successes as we grow and continue to serve our community.
 Andy Cochrane is the CEO of Maple Grove Hospital, Maple Grove, MN.
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