University of Iowa Health Care opened its new orthopedic-focused hospital in North Liberty; a first for the health system on April 28.
The 469,000-square-foot will provide spine, orthopedic, sports medicine care and more for patients in eastern Iowa and beyond.
J. Lawrence Marsh, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of Iowa and chair of the department of orthopedics and rehabilitation spoke with Becker’s about how the new facility is expanding care in the state.
Question: Can you expand on the benefits of this new orthopedic hospital?
Dr. J. Lawrence Marsh: It is an offsite hospital that is located 6.5 miles from the main campus. It is the first major hospital in our system that hasn’t been expanded on the main campus. We do have some offsite clinics and clinic buildings and we have acquired the private hospital downtown, so we are a three-hospital system, but this is the first hospital that was potted off of the main campus. The main campus is very full, as is the ER. The orthopedic space was in an old space we had outgrown. We were in the basement, which was fine 25 years ago, but we were a likely candidate to spearhead the new initiative.
The new site is predominantly an orthopedic hospital. It does have an ER as well, because in Iowa, to have a hospital, you must have an ER. It does have a general level 4 ER and it has a major imaging center. The imaging center has three MRIs and will service some of the imaging needs of the main campus. It has a drive-up pharmacy that will service needs beyond the hospital. All of the clinics are all orthopedic. It is predominantly an orthopedic hospital, and it is fair to call us that. There is a large physical therapy space designed to advertise our sports side.
We are doing an estimated 85%-90% of our orthopedic surgical work here now and we hope to get 90%-95%. We are only three weeks in right now. It is going well and is very exciting. It is a spectacular place, a big facility. Coming from the basement, we can’t help but talk about windows. We have all of our administration here and all of the faculty offices. Resident carousels and resident rooms are here. We have our biomechanics research room here. We have a weight bearing research CT, a gait lab and a nice orthopedic research space, as well as a large education center.
Q: Have you been seeing an increase in demand for orthopedic care?
JM: Yes, nationally and in the state of Iowa. During my career, there has been an escalating and increasing demand for orthopedic surgeries. Orthopedic surgery has been extremely successful during all of these decades. There is an aging population in Iowa and people want to stay active and do everything they have always been able to do. The range of musculoskeletal problems have all been increasingly amenable to orthopedic interventions of different shapes and forms and those trends continue.
They are national, and in the state of Iowa. It is a growth industry in healthcare. We were also in old facilities that we had outgrown, so orthopedics was a logical target to do this. There’s also a mobility aspect to the kinds of patients we take care of people using wheelchairs, crutches, walkers, etc., so being in a large academic medical center is not the most patient-friendly environment. If you have any physical or ambulatory ailments, ease of care is very important. We are super-thrilled and proud of this facility. There are aspects of the new hospital that are not terribly common around the country, but we are by no means new in building an off-campus orthopedic facility. There are many models around the country that we contemplated. We visited six or eight of those over a number of years to see how other academic centers had done what we have done.
Q: How else does the university plan to grow its orthopedic program over the next year?
JM: The new space we are currently operating out of, we are just short of being able to completely fill. The whole pro forma and the plan had us growing into the space. I have three faculty recruits coming at the end of the summer, and then we will be just about filled up at six months in. If I recruit more faculty next summer, it will start to be a challenge. The building was designed with shelled space in critical areas. There are four shell operating rooms, so we can grow from 12 to 16 rooms. We have 36 hospital beds and there is another pod of 12 so we can grow from 36 to 48 and there’s administrative space that would allow us to grow administration and we could add another pod of 12 clinics fairly easily. We plan to grow and expand our educational programs, expand the care we can provide to eastern Iowa, and growing the orthopedic department in this remarkable facility is part of the vision.
Q: What other orthopedic trends are you keeping an eye on right now?
JM: For us particularly, we are the team physicians for the Iowa Hawkeyes, so for us specifically, growth of sports was a target from the beginning. If we are able to successfully expand sports services, other specialties will follow along. In terms of other trends, there is a lot of shortage of spine care in the state of Iowa. We have two different departments that do spine care, we have good relationships and share call when we are separate. There is a lot of room to provide better spine services to the state of Iowa, and sometimes overwhelming emergent burdens. Other trends of course are in robotics for arthroplasty and spine, robotically enabled operating rooms and all of those things. We have a department of rehabilitation, so there’s biologic interventions for joints and ultrasound-guided therapies for tendons and all of those things.
