Thursday, November 09, 2006

Integrated health care on horizon

By Melina Rodriguez
Staff writer

Base Realignment and Closure is bringing more than a shift in jobs to the National Capital Area; it’s also bringing a change in where and how the area’s 86,000 enrolled military health care beneficiaries receive treatment.

The new 900,000 square foot DeWitt Health Care Network complex will be located on what is now Fort Belvoir’s South 9 Golf Course, according to Dr. Richard Repeta, director of DeWitt’s Integration and Transition Office.

“BRAC and integration — you hear those terms a lot, but what I want to make sure is that folks have an understanding of what the difference is between BRAC and integration,” said Repeta during the BRAC and Integration Road Show presentation on Friday.

The presentation was directed at hospital employees in order inform them of the most current information about BRAC, integration and their effects on the hospital.

“BRAC is building the buildings; we’re spending $1.5 billion to take four hospitals and make them into two … that’s BRAC. It’s the brick and mortar,” he said. 

Malcolm Grow Medical Center, DeWitt Army Community Hospital, National Navy Medical Center in Bethesda and Walter Reed Army Medical Center will become two hospitals located in Bethesda, Md. and Fort Belvoir.

“How do they have common business practices? How do they take care of patients? Do they even look the same on the inside? That’s integration. As you can imagine that’s a lot more challenging,” Repeta continued.

BRAC was announced in May 2005 and involves the realignment of Fort Belvoir. One major part of the change is enlarging DeWitt and integrating it into not only an Army hospital, but a joint military hospital, including Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps.

BRAC will bring about 22,000 new workers to Fort Belvoir, 3,000 of those people will work at the DeWitt Health Care Network complex.

“One of the things we would like to get out of today is how we can best communicate with you … because things are going to change over the next five years,” Repeta said.

DeWitt will be transformed from a 45-bed facility to a 120-bed hospital. It will have a 10-bed intensive care unit and 10 operating rooms. It will serve approximately 90 inpatients a day, which is a 500 percent increase from the current 20.

Other additions include a Level II nursery, nuclear medicine and radiation therapy.

“Cancer care is not something that we’ve done here, so now being able to provide cancer care to patients in the southern part of the National Capital Area is a very exciting prospect,” Repeta said. “[Patients are] not going to have to go to Walter Reed to get their chemotherapy and then have to drive all the way back to Woodbridge.”

The design process for the new hospital will take more than a year, and construction is expected to take around two years.
“This is an exceptionally fast time frame for building this hospital and that is why these processes — the design, the construction, all of these elements — are going on concurrently,” said Repeta.

During the presentation Repeta also discussed possible changes that will begin before the new medical center is built.

“What we’re starting to think about is how we can ramp up our services now to approximate the care level that we may be providing in the future, so that it’s not [as much] a shift in the scope of services [as] a shift in the volume,” added Repeta.

He also discussed the effects on the surrounding community and the possible solutions that the garrison is considering.

“Traffic is going to be an issue, we know that because Route 1 is packed already and we’re going to put a hospital on here that is three times the size of the one that we have now,” Repeta said.

“One of the thoughts about what we’re going to do to try and alleviate that congestion is actually build a bridge from Pence Gate over Route 1 and onto the other side of post so that people can access the hospital without having to cross Route 1,” he said. 

Following the presentation the audience was asked to fill out a survey to determine the best way to communicate these upcoming changes to the employees.

“Eventually we’d like to get to where everything is seamless, everything is the same. It’s easier on the patients, it’s easier on the staff and it’s more cost effective,” said Repeta.