Swedish hopes to stabilize need for emergency care with new center

By Sonia Krishnan
Seattle Times Eastside bureau

CALLISON ARCHITECTURE INC. Swedish Medical Center's new emergency center, being built in Issaquah, will be the first stand-alone emergency room in Washington.

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For people in the fast-growing communities of Issaquah and Sammamish, a medical crisis can mean a long ride through traffic just to get to the nearest emergency room.

By early February, that will be a thing of the past.

Swedish Medical Center is in the midst of renovating the former Amgen biotechnology lab on Northwest Sammamish Road, across from Lake Sammamish State Park, into an outpatient center to treat medical emergencies such as food poisoning, broken bones, chest pain and burns. It will be the first stand-alone emergency room in Washington.

The project is a part of Swedish's efforts to expand its Eastside presence as it competes for permission to build a larger, full-service hospital in Issaquah.

Officials for the nonprofit say the $20 million, 55,000 square-foot facility — which will also be home to doctors' offices and a sleep-disorder clinic — will meet the community's demand for nearby emergency-room services. The center will have 14 treatment rooms and is expected to draw 12,000 patients by the end of 2005. All patients, regardless of their insurance providers, will be accepted.

"With the growing population, especially in Issaquah and Sammamish, people would, for obvious reasons, like to have an ER as close as possible," said Kevin Brown, a Swedish vice president.

The 24-hour center will be more "customer-friendly" and boast nonconventional features such as private rooms where patients will be assessed, registered and treated all in one place. Patients can pass the wait time in the rooms with their families by watching DVDs or surfing the Internet .

"It won't be so sterile," said Dr. Brynn Karch, managing physician for the center. "It will be sort of a home environment."

Because the center won't be connected to a hospital, patients can't stay longer than 24 hours, said Byron Plan, executive manager of the state Department of Health's Office of Health Care Survey.

If serious trauma patients come in, they would be stabilized before they're moved to a hospital for surgery, Karch said. Still, the majority of ER patients aren't in life-or-death situations, so the Issaquah campus will be a convenient option for most people seeking urgent care, he said.

Swedish submitted plans last year to build a 175-bed hospital in Issaquah. But the state's largest hospital provider has some competition.

Bellevue-based Overlake Hospital, the Eastside's largest provider, also wants to build there. Both sides are waiting for a decision now from the state Department of Health about which proposal will go forward. A new general hospital would be the first to be built in King County since 1985.

Both Overlake and Swedish have been actively promoting their existing and planned services to the residents in Issaquah and the surrounding community.

Overlake's medical director at its emergency department in Bellevue, Stephen Marshall, said he is concerned that Swedish's new freestanding emergency room could cause "potential confusion" in the community.

"There are some people in the 21st century who don't call 911 and if they're having chest pains, they would go to the freestanding clinic. That's the population I worry about," Marshall said.

In life-threatening situations, time is crucial, Marshall said. "The longer we wait to get the patient to surgery, the more damage is done."

Freestanding centers "make sense in a rural area where you stabilize a [trauma] patient because it takes 60 minutes for a transport," Marshall said. "It doesn't make sense here in a metropolitan area."

Sonia Krishnan: 206-515-5546 or skrishnan@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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