Expansion will speed emergency treatment

In an effort to get both ambulance and drive-up patients through quicker, Medical College of Georgia Hospital is embarking on a $5 million expansion of its Emergency Department, with a new traffic flow and a separate area for behavioral health patients. The hospital is working to create better efficiency, as are scores of hospitals across the country and in Augusta.

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This artist rendering shows part of the $5 million expansion that will add 10 new acute-care beds and a behavioral health area to accommodate growth.

The current MCG Hospital Emergency Department, which opened around 1991, was designed for about 45,000 patients a year but saw more than 76,000 last year, said Rich Bias, the senior vice president, ambulatory and network services. And that is only expected to grow, he said.

"We certainly don't see anything slowing down here," Mr. Bias said.

Over the past 10 years, emergency departments have seen 10 percent to 20 percent growth, and that is picking up, said Manuel Hernandez, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians.

"Even in the past year, with the current economic environment, there's been about a 5 percent increase in ED volume nationwide, just for the past year alone," said Dr. Hernandez, the director of clinical intelligence for Sg2, a health care consulting intelligence think tank. "Most emergency departments just were not built to handle the volumes of patients that they're treating now."

The MCG Hospital expansion will increase capacity to 90,000 patients a year, adding 10 new acute-care beds and the separate behavioral health area. Often those patients sit in an exam room waiting for a transfer to the inpatient psychiatric unit or to another facility, preventing the exam room from being used for a medical patient, Mr. Bias said.

"What this will allow us to do is staff this space specifically with folks with behavioral health backgrounds," he said.

Over the past three years Duke University Medical Center has completely redone its Emergency Department, and as part of that it added a dedicated behavioral health unit that should add to patient and staff safety, said Lee Benjamin, the assistant professor of emergency medicine and pediatrics at Duke and a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians.

The whole Emergency Department operates much more efficiently and moves patients through more quickly, but it is still at risk of keeping patients who should be admitted to the hospital because no bed is available for them in the main hospital.

And that can affect patient waiting times in the department, Dr. Benjamin said.

"We're seeing an older population of patients, a sicker population and larger numbers," he said. "But without hospital beds available upstairs to send patients to, everything backs up into the Emergency Department."

MCG Hospital will also be addressing that issue, Mr. Bias said, and over the next several months the hospital will free up 32 more beds.

"We're doing this on two fronts -- staffing beds, adding new beds to our total available capacity as well as adding space in the emergency room," he said. "We believe by doing that we're going to be able to treat and discharge more rapidly the patients who are coming to us directly."

University Hospital is also renovating to add efficiency and speed up waiting times, expanding its ER waiting room and adding 12 new minor treatment rooms, spokesman Steve Crawford said.

Doctors Hospital has been focusing on its processes to try to drive down wait times in the ER, spokeswoman Olena Scarboro said.

"We want to be as fast as we can," she said.

Trinity Hospital of Augusta is doing fine with its Emergency Department, which was renovated in 2004, spokeswoman Rachel Covar said.

Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tom.corwin@augustachronicle.com.