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Only six years after opening its doors, Oklahoma Heart Hospital is out of room. The hospital was originally developed as a specialty arm to Mercy Health Center. But in the years since it’s opened, the hospital has become a shining example of how, when the pieces fall into place, specialty hospitals can harmonize a community’s healthcare.

Dr. John Harvey, CEO

“We opened with 78 beds, but the success of the hospital in terms of patient satisfaction, quality measures, and employee and physician satisfaction has led to tremendous growth,” said Dr. John Harvey, CEO. “We’re at a point now where we cannot take any more volume.”

Part of the solution will come from a 75,000-square-foot, $35 million expansion adding 16 inpatient beds and 10 day-patient beds, as well as an expanding the hospital’s ED to 12 beds. The project will expand the hospital’s electro physiology lab and OCA’s clinical space within the facility. But in a state with one of the country’s highest incidence of heart disease, the expansion was still not enough. A little more than a month after breaking ground on its expansion, Oklahoma Heart Hospital broke ground on a $75 million hospital in Southeast-ern Oklahoma City.

Mirror image
Much of the preplanning, development, and execution of what will be known as Oklahoma Heart Hospital South Campus will mirror that of the Northwestern facility. The idea to develop the campus began in mid-2006 when a group of physicians practicing on the southeastern end of the city approached Harvey.

A group of doctors approached Dr. Harvey to build a hospital because their patients wanted to come to us,” said Peggy Tipton, COO. “They heard what we have here, the quality and service, and their patients want to come to our hospital. They wanted something like our hospital on their end of town.”

Because the partnership between OCA and Mercy worked well at the original heart hospital, Harvey approached two local health systems, Norman Regional Health System and Midwest Regional Medical Center, when forming the ownership structure for the Southeastern facility. The physicians that approached him work for those health systems, and rather than directly competing with them, Harvey offered them an ownership position to ensure stronger long-term success.

“We’re privately held, but we’re not focused on the immediate bottom line,” said Harvey. “What matters to us is what will be successful five, 10, and 20 years from now.”

Like the original hospital, the 163,000-square-foot facility will be completely paperless and all-digital. The new facility is smaller than the original, with only 62 beds and three stories, but it will have a larger ED. The high patient satisfaction levels derived from the original hospital’s low nurse-to-patient ratio (lower intensity units have a one-to-four nurse to patient ratio while ICUs have one-to-two or one-to-one ratios) will be duplicated, as will the patient room set up.

“Our hospital is divided into eight-bed pods with at least two nurses, if not more, in every pod,” Harvey said. “We subdivide departments to make it as efficient as possible, and the next hospital will be set up in the same fashion.”

Bigger picture
With the spatial challenge tackled, Oklahoma Heart Hospital can now focus on one of its larger challenges: healthcare legislation. A national push is underway to outlaw specialty hospitals with physician ownership. The argument, said Harvey, is that doctors will inappropriately refer patients to a hospital, and year after year, legislation has been presented to ban physician-owned specialty hospitals. But arguing why a hospital with the highest quality measures by CMS in Okla-homa, the highest patient satisfaction scores in the US, and a 98.2% nursing retention rate is a bad thing has, to date, not been easy for those fighting what Harvey and Tipton agree is a sure thing.

“Doctors know what they’re doing, and hey’re often the best people to run a hospital because they make their decisions based on what’s right for the patient,” Tipton said. “That’s not always true in the administrative world. It is a blessing to work in an organization where quality and service are at the forefront of the decisionmaking.”

Along with the 130 other specialty hospitals in the nation, Oklahoma Heart Hospital would be grandfathered in if the legislation did pass, but it would not be able to expand beyond the current construction projects. “If legislation said we couldn’t grow, it’s essentially telling our not-for-profit hospitals they can’t grow their cardiovascular product line. We object to a blanket legislation that prevents our type of arrangement,” Harvey said.

Lifestyle change
Oklahoma Heart Hospital can only influence the decision to a certain extent, but one area in which it can make an impact is educating the public on heart-health awareness. The hospital has partnered with the American Heart Association and has hosted public screenings at Oklahoma’s state capital and with children, teens, and adults across Oklahoma.

Although the state’s statistics have not changed, Harvey said he sees the culture shifting. “The mayor of Oklahoma City launched a Lose 1 Million Pounds campaign this year, and there is a push to improve the type of food served in school systems,” he said. “At the end of the day, we deal with the end stage of heart disease. To improve those numbers reflects more of a lifestyle change than providing an angioplasty or bypass surgery or transplants.”