Rome Health has made many recent improvements. Here's what's been done

While the Mohawk Valley Health System was building a new hospital, Rome Health was busy, too, building its future.

The health system has undertaken a string of capital projects and other improvements in the past two years to transform the way it provides health care for its community.

The changes, once all the work is finished, will affect surgical patients, the hospital’s sickest patients, new moms and their families, people getting primary or specialty care from Rome Health physicians, the health system’s workforce and likely, just about anyone else who comes to the Rome Health campus.

“What we’re trying to do at Rome Health,” Chief Operating Officer Ryan Thompson said, “is to redefine what community-based health care is. … Health care is fiercely local so making sure you’re evolving your health care system to meet the needs of the community is so important.”

The improvements

Here are the improvements, in chronological order:

• A new medical center opened on Rome Health’s campus in November 2022. The $11.5 million building houses offices for the health system’s primary care providers and specialists, imaging services, a lab and pharmacy. 

• And late last year Rome Health completed $800,000 of work on its main acute care unit, renovating all patient rooms and upgrading four rooms for bariatric surgery patients.

• Last spring, a new, $3.8 million women’s surgical services suite opened on the hospital’s fourth floor near its maternity unit with an operating room primarily used for C-sections.

• On Nov. 29, the health system hosted a ceremonial groundbreaking (with construction work to begin soon) on a $45.7 million project to build an addition with four operating rooms equipped for robotic surgery, two procedural rooms, a new, nine-bed intensive care unit; and to renovate the existing operating rooms and pre- and post-op areas into new pre- and post-op areas and staff support space.

• Rome Health is partnering with the Oneida Indian Nation to open a clinic in a planned expansion at Turning Stone Resort Casino in Verona to offer care to Turning Stone employees and customers.

• State inspectors are coming to Rome Health this month; health system officials hope to hear shortly afterward, perhaps by the new year, whether the hospital has been approved as a primary stroke center, a designation that would allow more stroke patients to be cared for at the hospital, although patients needing procedures and surgeries would still get transferred to more advanced stroke centers.

• Rome Health has also recruited two orthopedic surgeons and a sports medicine specialist in the past year as well as primary care providers, and now has neurologists performing surgery in the hospital, officials said.  

The total cost of projects finished last year or this year, or started this year adds up to nearly $62 million.

Aging facilities

Rome’s path to its future is far more typical for hospitals in New York than the Mohawk Valley Health System’s construction of the new Wynn Hospital in Utica, just the  fourth new, full-sized hospital in the state since 2010.

Rome Health’s 57-year-old operating rooms are fairly typical. Most of the state’s hospitals are relatively, or really, old.

“The infrastructure is one of the oldest in the country probably,” said Kevin Kerwin, vice president for advocacy and legislative counsel for the Iroquois Healthcare Association. 

So updates are needed to incorporate new technology, make care more efficient and meet other modern needs.

“I think all of our hospitals in upstate are trying to do their best to provide access to services at a high level of patient satisfaction,” Kerwin said. “And that takes investment.”

MVHS was able to build the $650 million Wynn Hospital thanks to an initial grant of $300 million from the state. And state grants have helped many hospitals across the state to modernize, including Rome Health.

A state transformation grant provided $26 million for the project. (Rome Health has also received American Recovery Plan Act (ARPA) grants from Oneida County ($3 million for the medical center) and from the city of Rome ($3 million toward the addition.) 

“The state has been providing statewide transformation grants over the last five years at least,” Kerwin said. “And they’ve been significant investments, for capital projects in particular.”

Hospitals are currently waiting for the state to put out a request for proposal for transformation grants funded by the 2022-2023 state budget, he said. A fifth round of grants was approved in the 2023-2024 budget and those will go toward information technology infrastructure and cybersecurity, he said.

“I think that any of our member hospitals … would welcome,” Kerwin said, “the opportunity for dollars to modernize things.”

Benefits of improvements

Many of the improvements at Rome Health relate to one big statistic: the hospital has seen a 26 percent increase in the demand for surgical services since 2020, Thompson said.

The addition of the women’s surgical suite, for example, streamlined care for women undergoing C-sections; they, and their partners, no longer have to go down to the first floor for surgery and then back up to the fourth floor, said Cassie Winter, vice president of communications and marketing.

But it also let the hospital schedule more surgeries, she said. Previously the hospital had always kept one of its four ORs free for an emergency C-section. Now it can schedule four surgeries at a time, she said.

“A lot of the investments that we make,” Thompson concurred, “aren’t just singularly focused.”

And the opening of the medical center, which consolidated care previously offered at several locations, served a number of purposes, he added:

• Patients now have the convenience of getting all outpatient services addressed in one, familiar building.

• That familiarity and convenience makes patients more likely to follow through on needed care, whether it be lab work, a specialist appointment, imaging or testing.

• Providers are more likely to collaborate now that their offices are in the same building.

“What I believe is,” Thompson said, “if you make it convenient for the patients, you’re more apt to make sure the patients get all the services that they need.”

Several offices are still located off the health system’s main campus, including pediatrics, primary care offices in Camden and Boonville, an obstetrics clinic that focuses on the underserved, neurology and pulmonology offices, and the community recovery center for treatment of substance use disorders.

Goals

Convenience and keeping patients close to their homes (such as through the stroke center designation if it comes through) is particularly important in a county in which one in 10 residents don’t have a car, Winter pointed out. The issue isn’t just getting patients to providers; it’s also about letting families visit because families are important to healing, Thompson added.

He offered another statistic that shows how the health system needs to change: By 2030, one in four residents in Oneida County will be over the age of 65. That means health care is changing and providers have to offer the best care with the best access at the lowest cost, he said.

So, that’s an important focus for projects at Rome Health.

And providers have to do as much preventative care as they can, trying to keep patients from needing acute care in the hospital, he said.

Throughout its history, the hospital has regularly undergone renovations, such as the renovation and enlargement of the emergency department in 2000 and then of medical imaging, Thompson said. “We’ve been trying to keep along the way with continual renovations or evolving the area that we have to meet the needs as the needs change,” he said. “And this (addition) is just kind f the latest iteration of that.”

Although he couldn’t say what the next project will likely be, more capital projects in the future are a certainty, he said.

“All of those things are really going to get us to our mission,” Thompson stressed. “I think our mission says it all. Our mission is to provide quality health care with compassion.”

This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Rome Health renovates, builds addition to transform