Fletcher Allen Health Care is planning to propose more than $120 million in capital improvements this year.
The state’s largest health care provider gave the Green Mountain Care Board a heads-up last week, since the power to issue a certificate of need for health care facilities was transferred to the board on Jan. 1. Previously, the Department of Financial Regulation issued such permits.
The biggest project coming down Fletcher Allen’s line is a new $85 million inpatient building. The multi-storied building would begin three stories above the center’s Emergency Department parking lot, creating a canopy over the area.
David Keelty, Fletcher Allen’s director of facilities planning and development, said that the company’s stock of inpatient buildings is aging, with numerous structures dating back to the 1940s and 1960s. Right now, Keelty said, less than 60 percent of Fletcher Allen’s inpatient beds are private rooms.
“We’d like to move towards 90 percent for obvious reasons with respect to better management of the beds, infection control, gender issues, patient privacy, and improve the way we integrate families into the care process,” he said. “We want to look at a number of options for replacing our oldest beds with single-room environments.”
Fletcher Allen is also planning $15.4 million in renovations for a new mother-baby unit and new research center. The facility plans to move its mother-baby unit from a 50-year-old space to an area that has been occupied by the University of Vermont’s General Clinical Research Center for decades. Fletcher Allen plans to revamp the space and add a 2,800-square-foot addition to create 25 patient rooms for 28 in-patient mothers.
The research center would move to a former radiation oncology unit, which would be converted to a laboratory with necessary facilities for voluntary human studies.
Fletcher Allen plans to replace its two data centers, which it currently leases, with a new center priced at about $8.5 million. Fletcher Allen also plans to invest $7.4 million in Central Vermont Medical Center’s new $20 million information technology (IT) system, which would mesh with Fletcher Allen’s. CVMC is a participating member of Fletcher Allen Partners, which is an organization that brings four of the region’s largest hospitals under one umbrella.
“This project would allow us to integrate Fletcher Allen Partners’ system and will greatly improve the coordination of care so that we’re all working from the same platform or system, so that when our doctors leave Fletcher Allen and walk into Central Vermont Medical Center, they’ll be walking into the same IT system,” Keelty said.
Fletcher Allen is planning to replace imaging equipment in two catheterization labs, which will total roughly $4.6 million, and the hospital has already filed an application with the Green Mountain Care Board for a certificate of need to buy a $2.36 million MRI unit to replace a nine-year-old machine.
The MRI was approved for expedited review by the board, which is tasked with controlling Vermont’s rising health care costs. The board’s process for determining certificates of need on hospital expenditures is very similar to the Department of Financial Regulation’s, except that it allows for broader conditions under which a hospital can seek an expedited review for the permit.
Michael Donofrio, the board’s general counsel, said that for regular upgrades, like aging equipment, the board wanted to streamline the process.
“You wouldn’t have any policy disputes over whether a certain piece of equipment needs to be replaced; it needs to be replaced,” he said. “In routine situations we wanted the discretion to run (applicants) through the expedited review process rather than the prolonged process.”
Anya Rader Wallack, chair of the board, said this new process allows the board to concentrate its regulatory efforts on more important applications.
“We tried to streamline and relieve some of the burden of the regulatory process for routine matters that don’t need serious review so that we can focus on the ones that are more significant,” she said.
