Piedmont Henry Hospital will receive $3.5 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds for the construction of a new observation unit after a measure to designate that amount was approved by the Henry County Board of Commissioners at its November 1 regular meeting.
The reason for the hospital expansion was outlined by Piedmont Henry chief executive officer Dr. Lily Henson, who made a presentation to the commissioners at the meeting.
“Observation patients are those deemed by insurance companies to require less than 23 hours in the hospital. [They] undergo a series of tests to determine whether they meet criteria for full admission,” said Henson. “Right now our observation patients are scattered throughout the hospital because we are so jam packed that we will place our patients in any space available.”
Henson said the current situation would be greatly improved once the new unit is up and running.
“We would put 16 patients in a discrete unit where the focus of the team would be to make a decision about whether the patient is ready for discharge or not by the 23-hour mark,” she said. “So it would be a much more efficient use of space.”
The planned expansion will cost $3.5 million in federal money with $2.4 million of that total going toward construction. Henson estimates it will take about six months to complete once work is underway.
The observation unit is one of many functional areas of the hospital that have come to be at or over capacity, particularly since the onset of the pandemic.
“Although we only represent one percent of all the acute care beds in the state of Georgia, we actually hospitalized about five percent of all the Georgia COVID-19 patients,” said Henson.
At one point in August of 2021, the hospital reportedly had 170 patients in their 55-bed emergency room. While this figure has come down some since the peak of the pandemic, Piedmont Henry remains consistently over capacity. And with the closure of the Wellstar EMC center in Fulton County, they only see matters growing worse as more and more patients are being diverted to their facility.
As a result, hospital administrators are working quickly to try to grow to meet demand.
“We desperately need to expand,” said Henson. “We have been working very carefully to understand what the demand will be so that we can design a facility that accounts for the number of patients that we have as well as growth.”
Beyond a campus expansion, the hospital is also looking at adding new specialists, so they can care for as many patients as possible without having to divert them to other hospitals.
