the newsletter of tbd consultants - edition 2, 2nd qtr 2006 - Healthcare Special
						Printable PDF version Subscribe to our newsletter In this Edition Healthcare Facilities eMedicine SB1953-Painful Medicine Hospital Costs
		Construction Management Specialists 111 Pine Street, Suite 1315 San Francisco, CA 94111 (415) 981-9430 www.TBDconsultants.com
		Healthcare Facilities Healthcare has been going through some dramatic transitions in the past couple of decades or more. What are these changes and how are they affecting the design and functioning of healthcare facilties? Click the link below to read the article.
		eMedicine IT and healthcare are coming together in an effort to stem rising healthcare costs. By introducing electronic patient-record systems (that we are calling eMedicine), hospital groups aim at improving access for practitioners to patient records, increasing the number of patients that physicians can treat, speeding and improving the processing of billing, scheduling and prescription handling, and minimizing the chances of errors being made in treatments. CIO Insight magazine for Fall 2005 had an article about the introduction of HealthConnect in the Kaiser Permanente hospital chain. This $3.2 billion eMedicine project involves putting all patient records on a centralized computer system, with practitioners directly entering information about patient visits at the time of the visit (eCharting) and being able to call up past information about the patient as needed. For some of these healthcare workers it looked like a daunting system, but the use of templates makes inputs fast and also provides a check list, and consequently the learning curve hasn't been as steep as many feared. Some of the templates that the practitioners use for charting are ready made, but practitioners can also prepare their own and share them with others. The system also involves secure messaging, so that patients can consult with their doctor via email. There are also plans to give patients direct access to at least some of their records via a secure Internet interface. It is expected that the use of the HealthConnect system with reduce Kaiser's operating costs by around 10% and reduce medical-records supplies by at least 50%. By speeding up the processing and allowing doctors to see more patients each day, the system is anticipated to increase the hospital group's income by around 15%. An article in the June 13, 2005, edition of ComputerWorld points out that not all attempts at providing an electronic centralized medical records system has been successful, quoting the dropping of the electronic medical records (eMedicine) system at the Cedar-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, after only three months, because the healthcare workers there refused to use it. Actually, Kaiser's HealthConnect was that group's second attempt at a medical records system, after the first attempt failed for a number of reasons. The people that get drawn to a career in healthcare are not necessarily going to be the kind of people to jump at the opportunity to get involved in a computer system. But, as the ComputerWorld article points out, one hospital's traditional system for ordering and filling prescriptions covered 148 distinct steps involving different people and department, so streamlining that system and ensuring that information gets transmitted efficiently and accurately had to lead to cost savings. The infrastructure for these electronic records systems obviously adds to the initial cost of hospital facilities. Ten years ago the IT infrastructure for a new hospital might have been expected to be around 2% of the construction costs, but currently it can be around 5% to 10% or more.
		SB 1953-Painful Medicine SB 1953 was put in place to ensure that hospital facilities would still be functional after a major earthquake, but a side effect has been to send a seismic tremor though the healthcare construction market. We look at what SB 1953 is, and how it is affecting the construction budgets for healthcare projects.
		Hospital Costs Hospital construction costs have been increasing at about twice the rate of general construction work. What are the issues driving hospital construction costs? We address these issues in this article.
		Design consultant: Katie Levine of Vallance, Inc.