Tenn. Hospital Adds Beds to Accommodate Growth

Aug. 29--With admissions growing again at Chattanooga's biggest hospital, Erlanger Medical Center is bringing back old patient rooms converted to offices and closets over the past couple of decades when inpatient volumes were shrinking.

"We've scoured our entire system to find space wherever we can in the short term while we make our long-term improvements," said Rob Brooks, Erlanger's chief operating officer. "We have been looking at closets, sleeping rooms and offices."

Brooks said 12 former patient rooms were recently converted from offices and sleeping areas back into patient rooms at Erlanger North in Red Bank and other such rooms will be converted back for patient spaces at Erlanger's other facilities at the main hospital, Erlanger Bledsoe and Erlanger East. The hospital is also working to improve how patients enter and are released from Erlanger and how hospital physicians treat patients to help shorten the length of hospital stays and free up hospital beds.

Erlanger admissions grew to more than 32,000 in the fiscal year ended June 30, or about 3,000 more than the previous year, hospital officials said.

Joe Winick, Erlanger's senior vice president of planning and business development, said the hospital is attracting more patients from a broader area and is drawing more patients from its expanded physician network. The Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare, also has expanded the number of persons with insurance and therefore willing to go to the hospital for non-emergency care.

"We're full and working hard to make more beds available so that we have the capacity to serve more people," he said.

Last year, Erlanger began construction of a $40 million expansion of Erlanger East on Gunbarrel Road that will more than double the number of available beds and bring more specialty surgeries and services such as a cardiac catheter lab to the hospital. While work continues at Erlanger East, the hospital is raising money and making plans for a new Children's Hospital and other facility upgrades that could total more than $300 million to provide more and better space.

The expansion of beds reverses more than a decade of shrinking the number of hospital beds staffed at Erlanger facilities as more treatments have moved to outpatient, while the length of hospital stays, after everything from births to open-heart surgeries, has dropped.

Erlanger is licensed for 818 hospital beds, including 788 at its three hospitals in Hamilton County. Winick said at the end of July, 585 were staffed and in service, "but that number continues to rise almost daily."

Most of the former hospital rooms are still equipped with gas, communication and power lines to operate as patient rooms but they were often converted to storage closets, offices or sleep rooms for doctors and nurses who work long shifts at the hospital.

Kevin Spiegel, president and CEO of Erlanger, said physician visits "are up dramatically" and the hospital is on pace for another year of growth in revenue and market share among local hospitals.

Erlanger is scheduled to report is fiscal 2014-2015 earnings results next month and will reward incentives to its employees and executives this fall based, in part, on those results, Erlanger Health System trustee Jennifer Stanley said. Trustees are also evaluating Spiegel next month and setting performance standards for his incentives in the next fiscal year.

Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfree press.com or at 757-6340.

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