CONWAY — The construction of Baptist Health Medical Center-Conway was delayed by the wet spring weather, so the facility is scheduled to open in late summer 2016, Doug Weeks, executive vice president and chief operating officer, said Tuesday.
“We don’t get to build a hospital every day, and it’s pretty hard,” Weeks told the crowd gathered at Central Baptist College for the Conway Area Chamber of Commerce CEO luncheon. The $170 million hospital is being built at 1455 Exchange Ave. off Interstate 40, south of the Caldwell Toyota dealership.
Weeks said the medical center is unique in that it will have a co-management agreement with a group of physicians in Conway. About 35 Conway doctors originally owned the property, which they bought from developer Hal Crafton. In 2008, the doctors announced plans to build a hospital in partnership with Cirrus Health of Texas. A groundbreaking on the property was held in October 2008, and the hospital was supposed to open in mid-2010.
However, federal legislation governing physician-owned hospitals changed, and the project never got off the ground.
“They basically sold us the land,” Weeks said Tuesday. He said the physician group, led by Dr. Ben Dodge, will be allowed to practice at Baptist or Conway Regional Medical Center.
“There are no exclusions, no requirement they only practice at our facility,” he said. “We’re very much looking forward to working with them.”
The medical center will include a women’s center with labor and delivery, orthopedics, physical therapy, imaging,
cardiac care and an emergency room. The hospital will have an enhanced intensive-care unit with a team of critical-care nurses in Little Rock who will make “virtual rounds” on all patients in Conway to predict when they might be getting sicker. When this happens, a physician in Little Rock will contact the attending physician in Conway.
“I can tell you; this is a lifesaving technology,” Weeks said.
Troy Wells, CEO of Baptist Health Medical Center-Conway, said about 400 employees will be hired for the Conway facility, bringing the total number of Baptist Health employees to 8,400. Conway is the ninth hospital in its system.
He said several challenges come with a new hospital, and he touched on four.
A big challenge is the cost of health care, which includes drug costs. Health care costs were 17.5 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product in 2013 and are projected by 2024 to be 19.5 percent of the GDP.
“If it goes to 20-25 percent, the country will have a difficult time absorbing it,” he said.
Another challenge is technology, which “usually you don’t mention that in context of challenges,” he said. However, some of the changes, such as IBM’s artificial intelligence technology known as Watson, “intrigues and scares us at the same time,” he said.
Wells also mentioned an October article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about using technology similar to Watson to create “avatars,” computer-animated characters, to help empathize with patients’ pain.
Wells said health care providers have to figure out which technology is good for patients versus the cost.
The third challenge is a talent shortage, including registered nurses and specialty physicians, and the last challenge he mentioned is the complexity of health care.
“Up until October this year, there were 13,000 ways to describe a person’s illness or diagnosis; as of October, there are 60,000 ways to describe what’s wrong” because of a change in diagnostic coding, he said.
The level of specialists required today to deal with illness and morbidity is “incredibly complex,” Wells said.
“The implication for us is that teamwork and collaboration become more important.”
Wells said people ask why Baptist Health Medical Center wanted to come to Conway, and the simplest answer is, “We want to be part of what’s going on in Conway. We think this will become a destination for health care.”
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.