Maine Medical Center announced Wednesday it’s planning a $512 million renovation and expansion. The project would modernize the facility and add more single-patient rooms, which hospital officials say are becoming the standard for care of patients with increasingly complex health issues.
When Dr. Joel Botler began practicing at Maine Medical Center 37 years ago, the patients who came through the hospital’s doors typically had just a single health problem that needed to be treated.
“Those days are over,” he says.
These days, says Botler, who is now the chief medical officer at Maine Med, the patients he sees are much more complex.
“I’ll be in the emergency room and admit a patient who’s got eight or nine problems, and 20 different medications,” he says.
Treating these patients in a room they share with another patient, he says, is often not possible.
“The conversations that we have now, they’re very different than they were years ago,” Botler says. “Telling a person about their cancer diagnosis, or end-of-life discussions, or HIV discussions, or hepatitis C. The list goes on and on.”
To provide proper privacy and care, Maine Medical Center has to shut down beds in double-occupancy rooms on a daily basis. The situation creates bottlenecks, with patients from the emergency department or patients transferred from other hospitals waiting for available rooms.
Even though Maine Med is licensed for 637 beds, President and CEO Richard Petersen says the hospital’s true capacity is well below that.
“It’s not unusual for us to have 50 less beds on any given day,” he says.
The proposed renovation and expansion would add 128 single-patient rooms and convert many of the existing double rooms into singles. The total number of beds would hold steady at 637.
Petersen says staffing levels will also hold steady, at least initially.
“If our volume grows, which we believe it will, then you would see some additional staff being deployed,” he says.
Along with more single-patient rooms, the renovation and expansion would modernize 20 procedure rooms, would replace an existing parking garage and would shift the hospitals’ main entrance from Portland’s West End neighborhood to Congress Street, a major thoroughfare.
But with a price tag of half a billion dollars, what will this project mean for the price of care?
“We believe the numbers will be relatively small. A number of about 1 percent was used,” Petersen says — about a one percent increase in hospital charges.
He says even if that estimate is low, he doesn’t anticipate any cost spikes, because half the money for the renovation and expansion will come from fundraising and the hospital’s own reserves. The other half will come through a loan.
“We think by not doing this, and not being able to care for patients in the environment we need to, in the long run will be more expensive for us,” Petersen says.
Several studies have found that single-occupancy hospital rooms improve patient outcomes by reducing infection rates.
If Maine Medical Center successfully obtains permitting and regulatory approval, the renovation and expansion is expected to be completed in five years.
