Springfield Clinic preparing to open two new facilities

When one first walks into Springfield Clinic's new pediatrics facility on Old Jacksonville Road, they're greeted by three colorful dogs – a blue one named Vinny, a gold one named Honey and a green one named Cooper – along with splashes of color on the walls through silhouettes of kids and families.

This is, unsurprisingly, all doctor-approved color. Tom Fitch, vice president of facilities, real estate and construction for Springfield Clinic, said that they worked with their pediatricians to ensure that the new clinic would stand out from their adult facilities.

"A pediatric clinic is not like an adult medicine clinic," Fitch said. "We really wanted to understand their point of view to the smallest details so we could take those kinds of things into consideration as we designed the building."

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The new pediatric center, located along Old Jacksonville Road, is one of two new facilities that the clinic plans to open in the next month. A new lab facility at the corner of 7th Street and South Grand Avenue East will be fully operational at the end of the month, providing a newer, better facility for lab operations that were shunted into the basement of their main campus on South 6th Street.

Similarly, the hope for pediatrics is to provide a place where people can get everything from routine physicals to ultrasounds all under one roof in a comfortable environment geared towards children and teenagers.

For the children

How Springfield Clinic is trying to suit their new facility to the needs of their patients begins, believe it or not, in the parking lot.

Fitch said that unlike most medical facilities, they don't have a drive-up lane where vehicles can drop people off for quick entry. Since many children have a mind of their own and want to explore – sometimes without noticing moving vehicles – he felt that it was necessary to relieve unneeded stress for parents, while also keeping kids safe.

"Not having traffic in front of the building, it relieves that stress for parents coming and going," Fitch said. "The sidewalks extend into the parking lot; we've got three different lanes and the sidewalks extend out. The idea is, you park the car (and) you don't have to walk through the drive lanes to the front door like most businesses. Here, you can jump on a sidewalk that's protected from traffic and make your way to the front door."

Once they come inside, they'll notice all the colorful details along with fish tanks – which kids absolutely love, according to Fitch – as they go into one of the six separate areas where doctors and nurses meet with children. There's also a separate area for radiology work, which is also designed to relax and calm children through the use of creative lighting and a space theme.

"Getting an X-ray can be really intimidating for kids and some kids have to have them done on a regular basis," Fitch said. "We specifically designed the X-ray suites so that it would be fun and interesting, as fun and interesting as you can make an X-ray suite. We've got the star lights in the ceiling, we've got the wall coverings showing the solar system and what not. That can serve as a nice distraction for kids.

The LED lights that we have around the perimeter, we can change them. So if a kiddo is having a bit of a rough go (and) they have a color that they like, we can change the colors."

Color was also a key part of the new exam rooms within each of the six clinic areas, with artwork of things like animals, sports and Marvel comic book characters adorning the walls. There is a clinical element to these pictures, however, with Fitch saying that doctors and nurses will ask children to pick out colors and shapes during assessments.

"The artwork is actually part of the exam," Fitch said. "They'll ask them to pick out colors and shapes and communicate what they see. The physician is assessing all of those interactions during that visit, so it's not artwork for artwork's sake."

In addition, the clinical areas contain something rare for that kind of area – natural light. Fitch said that many clinical facilities inside hospitals are placed deep into the building, without windows or anything that could create light outside of the waiting area. For this facility, one key goal was to get as much natural light into the clinical areas as possible.

"Natural light is really important," Fitch said. "One of the design requirements was to push natural light in those areas. Too many clinical spaces are in-board into the building and they have no natural light whatsoever, so that was a big consideration for us."

In addition, each floor contains a lab area for the kinds of procedures that can't be conducted at the new South Grand facility.

"Here, we're taking the lab function to the patients in the exam room," Fitch said. "If you're in an exam room and you need labs, somebody from the lab is going to go into the exam room, get your samples, come back, test it and get your results in the exam room so that you don't have to switch locations."

Outside of the main exam areas includes a coffee shop – called Sprouts Cafe – a play area for children called the Cozy Room and what may be the most notable feature of all, a wooden slide that leads to the main floor.

Fitch said that the design of the slide was designed to be warm, with the three dogs near the entrance serving as a block for people coming down. With the slide and all the color, Fitch is looking for the new facility to alleviate some of the anxiety that comes with going to the doctor.

"A giant plastic slide didn't feel like it made sense here," Fitch said. "The whole idea is to lower anxiety for kids because now, all of a sudden, it's fun coming to the doctor."

Back to the lab again

Much of the new lab space on South Grand won't be open to patients or the public. What people will most likely use is the new drive-up lab space, which can be used for things like tests for COVID-19, the flu and other respiratory viruses along with vaccinations.

Fitch said that the idea for the drive-up lab actually evolved from temporary facilities at the old Family Service Center during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. He said that patients liked those services and felt that now they were on the same site on a permanent basis, they could expand on that.

"This concept was born in tents in front of these buildings," Fitch said. "We heard a lot from our patients how much they appreciated that. Now that we're past COVID, it was one of those things that we wanted to make permanent."

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Joe Heigert, director of laboratory services for Springfield Clinic, described how the drive-up space would work, with phlebotomists doing the lab work inside of a garage-like area with patients remaining in their cars before going into a back area in order to do testing on the specimens.

"We can do anything in the drive-up," Heigert said. "We can collect any type of blood specimen, nasal swab, things like that. We also provide vaccines in the drive-up right now and we're constantly looking to expand what we offer in the drive-up right now."

Convenience is key for all of this, according to Benjamin McLain, vice president of operations for Springfield Clinic. Instead of having to walk into an office to conduct lab work, now it can be done without having to leave the vehicle.

"It's one of the few benefits that we actually received from COVID," McLain said. "It forced us to change our model for lab processes. Instead of our patients having to park their car and walk into a building to get their blood work done, now (they have) the ability to do that while they have the convenience of sitting in their own car."

Behind the scenes, much of the new lab space will be off-limits to the public, wanting a completely sterile environment for physicians. What will be done in the rear is testing of specimens, microbiology work and work with microscopic tissue, better known as histology, while also housing administrative offices.

The main lab area is also equipped with some of the latest and greatest technology, a lot of which is automated and requires less manpower than usual. McLain was emphatic that while there would be a greater emphasis on automation in this new lab area, they weren't going to be reducing staff along the way.

"It doesn't mean reduction in people, it just means doing the same amount of work or more work with the same number of people that we have today," McLain said. "In our old lab space, we did not have the capacity to do as much automation as we know we wanted to. This space allows us the opportunity to bring in newer, higher quality pieces of equipment than we had before and it allows us to automate the process.

Lab techs are not easy to find, it's a hard to find area and most organizations struggle to find enough appropriately trained staff. This allows us to do some of that work more efficiently."

With the new technology, Heigert said that work can be done faster and increase the efficiency of the lab.

"It allows you to bring on more robust instrumentation," Heigert said. "One of the reasons that this new building exists is to advance the type of testing that we do in the community – not just your cookie-cutter lab type of testing, but that next level of advanced testing."

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Finishing touches being put on new Springfield Clinic facilities