Grand vision

Trinity Medical Center CEO Keith Granger has stood at the top of the new Grandview Medical Center and watched the cranes at work and the passing cars on 280. The building is not yet finished, but Granger envisions Grandview as a hospital where the workers in those cranes and the drivers in those cars can expect medical care as good as what his own wife, daughters or grandchildren would receive.

“We want to make sure we take this great clinical work, put it in a nice, shiny new building, put it in a convenient location for the communities that we hope to serve and are optimistic that that is going to be a great long-term benefit for the community,” Granger said.

Ahead of schedule

Progress on the Grandview Medical Center is moving faster than originally expected. Granger said the contractor, Brasfield & Gorrie, has finished about two-thirds of the floors in the almost one-million-square-foot building, with the remaining third a little over halfway complete. The finished floors still need to be furnished, but the unfinished ones include more specialized areas such as operating rooms, radiology, the emergency room and laboratories. These are scheduled to be finished in the third quarter of 2015.

Additionally, Granger said the construction crew has been adding a new level to the parking deck every 30 to 45 days, and they are making great strides on the eight-floor, 200,000-square-foot physician office that sits on top of the deck.

All this together means that Grandview’s original projected completion date in the first quarter of 2016 has been moved up, and Granger confidently said that the new medical center would be open by October 2015.

“We believe that we’ll celebrate our last Thanksgiving and Christmas in this building [Trinity] and be in the new building before the holiday season next year,” Granger said.

A grand vision

The finished product will be between 25 and 30 percent larger in square footage than Trinity’s current home on Montclair Road and include 3,000 parking spaces. Grandview will have larger patient rooms, and Granger said it will be a “fully-appointed” hospital with capabilities for 21 specialties, including emergency and intensive care, cancer, orthopedics, cardiology, obstetrics and neurology.

Granger said the new building will also feature upgrades or duplicates of the existing technology at Trinity.

The extra space is important, but Granger thinks the new building’s layout will be even more important. Grandview has a single parking deck instead of multiple, so visitors don’t have to move between decks to access different parts of the hospital and physician offices. The hospital is also consolidated into a single building, unlike Trinity’s multiple additions, so it will be easier for patients and visitors to get directly to the areas they need. Granger also believes the layout will make it easier for the staff to efficiently treat and care for their patients.

“More than the equipment and even more than the bricks and mortar — or in this case steel and glass — I think the real advantage is going to be workflow,” Granger said.

The Grandview location puts the hospital just a few miles from the intersection of the heavily traveled 280 and I-459. Granger said the hospital will be both easily accessible via these major roadways and right in the center of growing home markets, making Grandview’s services available to more residents in future years.

When Trinity makes the move and changes its name to Grandview, it will be bringing a high quality of care with it. Trinity has received awards and accreditation in various specialties, including chest pain, heart failure, cancer, bariatric surgery, sleep medicine and knee and hip replacement. The Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that promotes high quality healthcare, gave Trinity a Number 1 rating for quality of care in February 2014. Trinity was one of only 21 hospitals across the nation to receive a perfect score of 100 percent for its composite performance. In November, the Joint Commission named Trinity a Top Performer in Key Quality Measures for its third consecutive year.

“We’ve been working hard the last five years to improve and build what would be widely respected as the highest clinical outcomes possible,” Granger said.

In the future, Granger said patients can expect to see more technology and new services, such as a separate cancer care center that is planned for the site but has not yet begun construction. The Daniel Corporation, which owns the 65-acre property, has plans to build hotels, retail and office buildings around Grandview in the next decade.

Local effects

Grandview’s effects aren’t limited to its patients and physicians. Granger said the project has already brought construction jobs to the 280 area, which has also brought business to area restaurants. A 2009 economic impact study by economist Keivan Deravi projects that the completion of the hospital and the Daniel Corporation’s other plans will bring around 6,000 jobs and more than $400 million in annual earnings.

Those extra dollars will come with a side of traffic for 280. Trinity currently employs about 2,000 people and has beds for 560 patients, all of which will now be traveling 280 along with visitors and employees at the neighboring physician offices. Trinity and ALDOT have been working together to create better traffic flow in the area before the hospital begins running.

Granger said the plans haven’t been completed yet, but he expects them to include improvements to nearby intersections and better left and right turns for cars leaving the hospital’s campus. ALDOT Division 3 Engineer Brian Davis said the changes could include additional lanes on 280, but the plans will be finalized by early January.

After studying the hospital’s peak traffic times, however, Granger said the traffic impact won’t be as severe as it sounds. Surgery patients begin arriving at 5:30 a.m. and the majority of other patients and employees arrive between 6 and 7 a.m. With a shift change happening between 6:30 and 7 p.m., Grandview’s heavy traffic flow will happen before and after normal rush hours.

“A lot of our patient flow will occur outside those prime traffic windows on 280,” Granger said. “We want to make our actions as non-disruptive as possible.”

Ambulance and emergency personnel may find their workdays a little easier once Grandview opens at the end of the year. Along with the new freestanding emergency departments that Brookwood Medical Center and UAB Medical West are building, Grandview brings medical care much closer for emergency calls along the 280 corridor. Granger said he has talked with emergency medical officials as part of the planning process, and some have said the new hospital will help them drop off patients and get back into service as much as an hour sooner.

“It will help tremendously,” Hoover Fire Department Executive Officer Rusty Lowe said. “280 traffic in the morning, especially, and in the afternoon can be difficult, and that gives us another option for a patient that needs to be seen quickly in that area.”

“That is a very positive thing for us because it saves us from having to pass by Grandview and continue on to the downtown hospitals or Brookwood [Medical Center],” Grant Wilkinson, volunteer commander at Cahaba Valley Fire and Rescue, said.

The big hurdle

After construction is complete, there is one large challenge remaining in Grandview’s way: transporting physicians, patients and equipment between locations without interrupting medical care. 

Trinity has been coordinating with Prompt Ambulance Services for months to make the move happen. Ron Donahue, the vice president of business development at PAS, said the plan will be finished at the end of January and they will soon begin taking employees on tours of the new facility and training them for their roles on the big day.

“Everyone from the CEO to the dietary staff will understand their roles on move day,” Donahue said.

The plans include moving and installing as much equipment as possible before the patient move day, without compromising medical care. Granger said the staff will be prepared so they are completely comfortable with the new hospital while taking care of patients. There are also “contingency plans upon contingency plans,” Donahue said, to deal with any possible snag in the moving process.

PAS will be bringing in special communication systems and software to track every patient’s movements and medical needs. Granger said the hospital will contract between 40 and 50 ambulances to carry patients, each attended by any needed equipment or physicians. If the planning pays off, it will be a seamless process.

“Each of those patients will have a dedicated, assigned room,” Granger said. “When they leave here, we will know exactly where they’re going, we will have all their necessary items with them. They will be greeted and placed in that room as soon as they arrive on campus.”

The move will take between eight and 12 hours and will be completed on one day, most likely a Saturday. The opening of Grandview will be big news for 280, but Granger and the medical staff are most concerned with making the transition pleasant for the people in their care.

“We expect them to be having their evening meal on that Saturday night just like they would have if they had been here, perhaps with a better view and a little more spacious surroundings,” Granger said.