Nashoba Valley

Source: Healthcare Digital

Date :08/05/2008 06:11:10

Exec talks to Doreen Thomas about how Nashoba Valley Medical Center is growing, changing and developing

Written by Ian Armitage and Produced by Shaheen Mohammadipour

Founded in 1964, Nashoba Valley Medical Center (NVMC) is a community hospital serving eleven communities in North Central Massachusetts. Located in Ayer, the hospital boasts a highly qualified medical staff with 115 active and associate member physicians, offering community based primary care and a wide range of specialty services.

The hospital, which was formally known as Deaconess-Nashoba Hospital, was purchased in January 2003 by Essent Healthcare, Inc. and has 57 licensed beds.

“Nashoba Valley Medical Center is known for many strengths including emergency medicine, cardiology, gastroenterology, oncology, orthopedics, diabetes care and surgery,” says Doreen Thomas, chief nursing officer and chief operating officer at Nashoba Valley Medical Center, who is responsible for all hospital based clinical services, including acute care Nursing Services, Diagnostic Services, Rehab Services and Out-patient Medical Clinics.

Medical background

Thomas is a graduate of the Burbank Hospital School of Nursing, having received a BSN from Fitchburg State College and a Master’s degree in Healthcare Administration from Framingham State College. She has an extensive 25 year background in health care, including several years of clinical experience in acute care and medical oncology combined with 18 years of progressive nursing leadership.

“Our goal is to provide the highest quality of care through the blending of qualified, highly competent staff with state-of-the-art technology,” says Thomas, who knows exactly what good care is. Her nursing background and years of hospital operations experience allow her to better identify ways of successfully meeting that goal.

Bringing in the change

Nashoba Valley is perhaps best known for its diverse array of outpatient services in its Ambulatory Care Center and a broad spectrum of services in an on-site Occupational Health Center focused on prevention of work-related injuries and illnesses, rehabilitation and management of return-to-work issues.

As the hospital’s chief operating officer, Thomas has helped reform the way the hospital is run, making life better for patients. All clinical departments now have a common place for reporting, for instance. This, says Thomas, “gives us a better look at how we operate and where we can change.”

Nashoba Valley is a MediTech facility, as are most of the hospitals in Massachusetts, and uses that to improve operations, better coordinate care, prevent medical errors, streamline workflows, hasten reimbursements and operate more efficiently. “It is working so well that we have just started using the MediTech Health Care Information System (HCIS) in our emergency department, where we have changed over from a ProMed system,” adds Thomas.

MediTech has enormous benefits. It will provide patients, doctors and nurses, as well as administrators with easier, faster and secure access to vital health information. This has already improved patient care and will also help NVMC to better monitor, adjust and plan health services so they are not only effective but are sustainable over the long term.

But what does this mean for patients? Waiting times for test results and x-rays will be decreased, as will the number of unnecessary or duplicated tests and procedures. When a healthcare provider enters a prescription directly into the system, there will be less chance of clinical error due to transmission and interpretation errors.

“Health professionals will be more effective and efficient because they will have access to their patients’ information. MediTech combined with access to PACS will put patient care information at a physician’s fingertips” says Thomas.

New buildings

“NVMC is definitely in need of more space to expand services, adds additional services and for things as practical as storage,” Thomas, who says the hospital plans to build a new expand facilities on the current campus.

A new $2.8 million medical office building has already been completed, but more space is needed. The 10,000 square-foot building opened last summer and physicians moved in one by one to fill the four suites. “The medical building opened to accommodate physicians who couldn’t find a space for their practice inside the existing hospital,” says Thomas.

The completion of the medical building was the first phase of the hospital’s makeover project. Essent Healthcare, based in Nashville, Tennessee, pledged to make substantial investments when they acquired the hospital. By the end of the year, $16 million will have been spent in building and equipment upgrades.

The hospital is gearing up to renovate and add on to the existing 110,000-square-foot hospital. The project follows an industry trend to offer private patient rooms with “hotel-like” amenities to help make patients feel more comfortable. The first strategic planning committee meeting led by CEO, Steve Roach, took place on April 29th with many of the hospital’s active medical staff attending. Steve Roach has referred to the new project as “a new hospital within a hospital”. It is hoped the new hospital will be finished by late 2009 or 2010, at the latest.

“Healthcare is challenging – and I’m sure you’ll hear that from anyone you speak to,” says Thomas, who was worried not only by the lack of space but also by the difficulties all hospitals are having with recruiting and retaining staff. It is a very competitive market and NVMC is proud of their high retention rate.

“I’m very excited about the future and the construction project at Nashoba Valley Medical Center,” she adds. “Every day you keep looking at journal articles about hospital construction it’s just like building a home, when you think ‘wow! that’s a good idea, while we’re doing this we should do that’. It’s very exciting because there’s so much new technology out there and there’s so much new IT out there that will help with patient flow. And when you’re building, it gives you the opportunity to look at all those things.”

Nashoba is driven to succeed and does whatever it can to ensure patients get the best possible care. Exec looks forward to telling you more about this in the coming months…

Click here to view the corporate brochure on NVMC