Kathy Love
Chief Executive Officer
Clark Regional Medical Center
Winchester, KY
Can you describe the design of your new, state-of-the-art facility?
Our new building is about 131,000 square-feet. It’s built for 79 operational beds, including a 22-bed emergency room and five operating rooms. The main idea of the building is that it is a one-level design. It really allows for an efficient build for what we need today but also for the flexibility of a planned expansion over the next two-to-five years as the hospital grows.
What's the impact on cost of the facility? Does the energy efficiency of the building outweigh its building costs?
The complete cost of the building itself is $60-plus million when you add equipment and labor. If you look at our geothermal investment - to make the decision to have our entire hospital built with a 100 percent geothermal heating and cooling system - that was a million-dollar decision. This will be approximately 33 percent more energy efficient than the standard HVAC unit in the old facility. We anticipate that we will get that million paid back in the first year of operation between tax incentives and energy savings. To make that investment upfront and be able to get long-term energy savings that puts us in the positive by year two – we’re really excited about this and think it’ll be a strong point for our system. It is the first entirely geothermal hospital in Kentucky.
How will this new facility focus specifically on patient care?
We designed this facility to incorporate the latest technology but also patient comfort and privacy. Patients will not have to move from department to department in public areas. We’ve been able to incorporate the latest designs into a very efficient building space, and we could do that a lot more efficiently and cost-effectively by building a full replacement hospital rather than renovations. We have also designed a very outpatient-focused facility where we have brought the services patients use the most to the front of the building, for instance, pre-operative lab work or emergency services. Patients will not have to go to the depths of the building in order to access the facilities they need in an emergency or most frequently.