Sutter readies for medical migration with opening of new Santa Rosa hospital

Sutter Health nurse Robin Allen is having trouble sleeping.

For the past 2½ years, Allen has been directing efforts to draw up, revise and test plans to shut down the aging Sutter Medical Center on Chanate Road and, in a single day, move all the patients and staff into a new hospital complex 3 miles away.

“For the last month, I wake up every night at 3 a.m. thinking about moving this hospital,” she said. “All I dream about is moving this hospital.”

In one dream, she enters patient rooms at the new facility and finds they’re full of boxes. In another, she said, “I was dreaming that I was out there and I was helping to take care of patients and I was forgetting to run their IVs. I was forgetting how to be a nurse.”

The task of moving into a new hospital, from its initial planning phase to the actual move date - when an estimated 70 patients will be transported - is difficult to fully fathom. Like any other move, it begins with planning. Lots of it.

The $292 million hospital, which opens Oct. 25, is the first new hospital built from scratch in Sonoma County in a quarter- century. Sutter will spend $7 million on the move alone, a sum that covers, among other things, the cost of planning, consulting, moving equipment and licensing fees.

On Saturday, Sutter offered a public preview of the new facility, taking an estimated 1,100 to 1,500 visitors on tours. The line to get in snaked well around the building at times as people waited in the afternoon heat to get a look at the building.

Cecelia Bianchini of Santa Rosa is expecting to deliver her second child in about eight weeks and came with her parents to tour the new birthing facility.

She delivered her first in the old one. “This is a lot better, a lot bigger than the other place,” she said.

Jennifer Crane, also of Santa Rosa, brought friends from Berkeley to tour the new hospital. They waited in the shade, listening to music, as they waited for the line to shrink. “It looks like a stunning facility from the outside,” she said.

“This represents a profound investment in this community for Sutter Health,” said Mike Purvis, chief administrative officer for Sutter’s operations in Sonoma County, earlier in the week.

In the summer of 2012, before the first drop of concrete was poured at the construction site, Sutter started preparing for the transition to its new home off Highway 101, next to the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts north of Santa Rosa. With the help of a consultant with national expertise in moving hospitals, Sutter organized teams of employees to begin planning the move.

One of its main objectives was to avoid operating two hospitals at once. One reason was that Sutter’s hospital license only covers the operation of one hospital. Also, it’s hard enough to operate one hospital, Allen said.

“You don’t want to have a few patients left over there,” Allen said. “You want all of your resources available to all of your patients.”

To achieve this goal, Sutter crafted an intricate plan to move patients, staff, equipment and records to the new hospital, essentially flipping the switch on at the new hospital and turning it off at the old facility on the same day.

Over the past two years, a significant portion of the almost 1,000 Sutter Medical Center employees in Santa Rosa underwent about 54,000 hours of training on such things as new hospital procedures, new equipment, general building orientation, new fire and safety systems and electronic health records.

At the beginning of 2013, while the hospital was still under construction, Sutter staff conducted hours of “occupancy planning meetings” that gave employees a conceptual view of what their units would look like and the equipment they would need.

Using floor plans, hospital staff examined the “flow” of the new hospital, Allen said. That includes how patients are moved within each department and from one department to another.

“We looked at where the bathrooms are, the kitchen, where surgery was, the emergency department and all the other departments,” Allen said. “We got to know the building on paper.”

There were 300 hospital processes identified that needed to be changed or adopted, ranging from a new electronic health records system to the linen cart exchange. Processes had to be developed for the new pneumatic tube system, the new automated refrigeration system, the new alarm system and much more.

Hospital officials said the opening of the new facility - which has been dubbed Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital - is a major milestone.

“A totally new hospital doesn’t happen often,” Purvis said.

In 1996, Sutter took over the county-run Community Hospital on Chanate Road, agreeing to contract with the county through 2016 to provide an array of health care services, including indigent care, medical services for jail inmates and reproductive services for women, including abortion.

In 2006, Sutter proposed building a 124-bed hospital to replace the aging Chanate campus, which required costly seismic retrofitting. But Sutter dropped that plan the following year, citing mounting financial losses.

Sutter then proposed transferring the county contract to provide medical services for the poor to its rival Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. That plan, however, was abandoned after Sonoma County officials were unwilling to allow Sutter to opt out early from its contract.

Sutter then came back in 2008 with plans to build a scaled-down, 183,000-square-foot hospital. The new plan represented Sutter’s acknowledgment that it had to find ways to meet obligations to provide publicly guaranteed health services under contract with county government.

The new Sutter hospital is smaller than hospitals operated in Santa Rosa by rivals Kaiser Permanente and St. Joseph Health, which runs Memorial Hospital. But it will have state-of-the-art technology and a neighboring office building that Sutter hopes will help it draw local doctors and their patients.

The new hospital will have 40 general medical surgical beds; 20 obstetrical surgical beds; 12 intensive care unit beds; 12 neonatal intensive care beds; 10 labor, delivery and recovery beds; a 24-bed observation care unit; and a 12-bay emergency department equipped with three rapid care stations for treating patients whose injuries are not severe.

Additionally, Sutter has built an 80,000-square-foot medical office building adjacent to the new hospital. The medical office building, which is scheduled to open five days before the hospital, will house an ambulatory surgery center on the first floor, giving the combined medical complex a total of 14 operating rooms.

The new hospital, which will employ 950 doctors, nurses and other staff, is expected to receive about 50,000 hospital visitors annually.

Aside from creating new processes and policies for the new hospital, Sutter said the transition also involved overcoming a number of regulatory hurdles.

More than 50 licenses and permits had to be changed, including the hospital pharmacy license. Every hospital policy had to be rewritten or new ones had to be created. For example, a new policy was written for the hospital’s new high-tech infant alarm system, which monitors the movement of any infant or child within the facility to ensure their safety.

Also, policies were written for the hospital’s novel 25-bed outpatient care unit on the first floor, which will be used for patients who are in the hospital for less than 24 hours. In all, about 1,000 policies had to be rewritten or created.

In the past few weeks, since the end of construction, hospital staff has been working in the new hospital readying equipment, training on electronic health records and getting ready for the big move. Purvis said the most stressful thing about moving into the new hospital is ensuring that it “occurs with complete patient safety.”

“The move will only be done if we believe that every patient can be moved safely,” Purvis said.

Last Thursday, top hospital officials and staff conducted an exercise to practice moving imaginary patients from the Chanate campus to the Mark West Springs Road site.

More than a dozen Sutter executives and managers crammed into a small conference room at the new hospital. They tracked the flow of imaginary patients at different points of the move, posing simulated issues and problems, such as an emergency room cart needing to be transported to the new hospital; a leaking ice machine; or a nurse call light out of order in a patient’s room.

The drill tested staff communications at each point of the process. A drill involving people posing as patients will take place Oct. 15.

Only after moving day will the fruits of Sutter’s planning pay off.

“It’s the closing of a hospital and the opening of a new hospital on the same day,” said Lisa Amador, Sutter hospital’s strategy and business development executive. “There’s no down-time between the two. That’s when the 54,000 hours of training come to life.”

Staff Writer Jamie Hansen contributed to this report. You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.