Making a mark

Most hospitals hustle out patients as quickly as they can. After all, the government and insurers demand it.

Now, a new breed of hospitals accepts patients with complicated medical cases for the long term. These are people who are too sick for skilled nursing care or inpatient rehabilitation facilities and might require a ventilator or have multiple organ failures, for example.

These new long-term hospitals help general hospitals lower patients' length of stay, a factor that's now used by the government and insurers as incentives for reimbursements.

Missouri-based Landmark Hospitals is building such a long-term acute care hospital in Naples. Built by Fort Myers-based Stevens Construction, the $25 million, three-story facility near Immokalee Road and Goodlette-Frank Road in Naples will have 50 beds when it opens next month.

“This is the new prototype model for future development,” says Jimmy Dascani, the newly appointed CEO of Landmark Hospital of Southwest Florida in Naples.

It's no secret that general hospital beds in Southwest Florida are often filled to capacity, and the problem is exacerbated over the busy winter months when seasonal residents flocked to the area. “Now they can offload complex ICU people to us,” Dascani says, referring to the sickest patients who end up in the intensive care units of general hospitals.

In addition to large private rooms for each patient, the Landmark Hospital building will also include surgical suites so patients don't have to be transported to other locations for further surgery. This is important for general hospitals because the government now penalizes readmissions.

Surgery suites at Landmark also help patients because they don't have to be transported to another location. “Here, we just wheel them down the hall,” Dascani says.

In addition, the new Landmark hospital will house a radiology department so patients don't have to travel for those services, either. “We're elevating the patient-family experience,” Dascani says. “This is new for our entire industry.”

What's more, the Landmark hospital will be equipped with the latest electronic medical records technology currently being developed by a team of seven software engineers at sister company Technomad in Bonita Springs. Both Landmark and Technomad are privately held firms founded by William Kapp, a Cape Girardeau, Mo., physician who lives part-time in Naples.

“We're just about to go to market,” says Joseph Morris, Technomad's chief information officer. “It's taken us two-and-a-half years.”

Already, the technology called ChartPad saves physicians 90 minutes a day on average at other Landmark hospitals because it relies on more intuitive voice-activated and touch-screen technology to speed the filing of case reports, says Morris. “There's no perfect electronic medical record system, but this is as close as it gets,” says Dascani.

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