Virginia Mason's new hospital designed for care transformation

DESPITE the economic downturn of recent months, it's easy to look around the region at construction cranes and assess that hospital services are in high demand. Nearly every major medical center here is either in the midst of construction or considering facility expansion. Most of these hospitals are building new facilities to meet growing patient needs and replace out-of-date buildings unable to accommodate new technology and services.

At Virginia Mason Medical Center, patient demand and facility needs were concerns for us, too. But unlike our peers, we're building a new hospital with a different goal in mind. We want to build a hospital facility that will help us truly transform health care. It will be the first hospital in the country entirely planned and built using patient-centric principles — based on the Toyota Production System — that reduce waste, improve quality and make a perfect health-care experience possible.

It sounds like a lofty goal. We know people are behind every health-care experience and people are not perfect. So how do you build to deliver better value and create the perfect health-care experience?

Over the past seven years, Virginia Mason has embraced a management method called the Virginia Mason Production System (VMPS) based on Toyota's approach that allows for continual improvement to reduce waste and improve quality. This approach focuses on creating standard processes and building safeguards that prevent mistakes from happening.

The results have allowed us to improve quality, transparency and efficiency, measured in better patient outcomes and cost savings throughout the medical center.

Now we're extending this management method to developing a new facility.

We had to abandon the traditional model of hospital construction, whereby engineers and architects lay out the blueprint. Instead, we involved people on the front line — the health-care team and patients themselves. Through their participation, we were able to design a better kind of hospital — one that keenly reflects the patient's point of view from the inside-out. With insights from team members and patients, we rethought everything from how we can eliminate waiting rooms to the way people and supplies move through our campus.

By taking this patient-centric approach, we have turned the whole notion of treatment around to make services flow to the patient. First, we're creating parallel corridors that separate the flow of patients and providers. This will eliminate an age-old problem where hospital floors were laid out along the lines of a hotel, with a single corridor serving all functions. By breaking from this model, we create "patient zones" that are free of equipment and supplies and "provider zones" that allow physicians and nurses to get to patients quickly, thereby decreasing wait times.

Just off these corridors, universal-treatment rooms allow us to bring the vast majority of tests directly to the patient's bedside, reducing waiting times and improving handoffs to staff members. Built-in safeguards, like hand-washing stations, prevent providers from proceeding without following proper procedures. And companion areas in each room allow for family members to feel comfortable at visits, not in the way.

Indeed, Virginia Mason has already realized the benefits of implementing a patient-centric approach in our existing hospital. The work we are doing to reduce the non-value-adding waits and delays in every hospital stay have helped us to reduce our patient's time in the hospital by an average of 10 percent, and we believe there is opportunity for even more.

At the same time, our nurses are spending more time with their patients. All of this work will free up hospital beds for the future and allow us to avoid unnecessary capital expense.

Virginia Mason's leadership in this area has enabled us to set new patient-care quality standards for the health-care industry and make real and measurable improvements in safety, quality, service, staff satisfaction and cost performance. The result of our work will continue to create greater value for our customers and increase patient satisfaction. By using this approach to guide the design of our new hospital, we will increase patient safety, reduce delays in seeing physicians and provide more timely treatment — and transform health care for all patients.

Sarah Patterson is executive vice president and chief operating officer at Virginia Mason Medical Center where staff and leaders are committed to transforming health care.