Dan Simmonds, project manager for the two new facilities
It’s not often a trip to an emergency department is carefully planned, includes a VIP tour, and an exchange of ideas over dinner, but that’s exactly what happened recently at an Intermountain ED near Denver, Colorado.
Intermountain is opening standalone emergency departments in Saratoga Springs and in Hurricane in July of 2023.
Rachelle Rhodes, RN, is the executive director of Emergency Departments and Trauma Operations in the Canyons and Desert Regions.
“Intermountain’s long-term vision is to ensure that all patients have easier access to care,” she says. “Intermountain identified a couple of high-growth areas or markets where perhaps communities are a little underserved because their location is further away from an Intermountain hospital. So the strategy is to place a freestanding emergency department in these geographic locations.”
Jared Stevens, director of the Emergency Department and Trauma Operations at St. George Regional Hospital
She said Intermountain will continue to monitor growth in these areas to determine the next logical steps for the new facilities in those markets.
Dan Simmonds is the project manager for the two new Utah facilities.
“We started meeting together to work through these plans for freestanding emergency departments for Saratoga and Hurricane back in February and we quickly realized we’re new at this,” Dan says. “We didn’t know a lot about what we’d be doing. And we found out legacy SCL Health had been running a freestanding emergency department for six years already in Northglenn, Colorado. We identified that as an opportunity to potentially have a little knowledge share. We decided to go and see, and figure out what lessons they’ve learned from this process.”
It’s not that those who are planning the new facilities don’t have experience with emergency departments. Jared Stevens, director of the Emergency Department and Trauma Operations at St. George Regional Hospital and Dallas Rasmussen, Emergency Department manager for American Fork Hospital, have been part of the planning process from the beginning.
Dallas Rasmussen, Emergency Department manager for American Fork Hospital
A freestanding emergency department faces some unique challenges and they thought they could benefit from what the caregivers at the Saint Joseph’s Northglenn Freestanding Emergency Department have already learned.
“If you think about our Emergency Department here in St. George, about 80% of patients we see are treated and released,” Jared says. “There are some things the freestanding ER isn’t really equipped to do and doesn’t plan to do.”
He says that if an EMS team knows, for example, that someone’s suffering from a heart attack, serious injuries, or is more likely to need a higher level of care, they will bypass the freestanding facilities and take them to the hospital where those services are readily available. Most of the people the freestanding EDs will see will be for things where they can be treated and released. These communities want a place closer to home where they can get this kind of emergency help 24/7.
The Intermountain caregivers planning the two new facilities reached out to the Saint Joseph’s Northglenn Freestanding Emergency Department to see if they could make a visit.
Amanda Carrillo, RN, clinical manager for Saint Joseph's Freestanding Emergency Department
“They were so warm and welcoming,” Jared says. “And they just put us at ease and opened their minds and their hearts to us. They were so thoughtful.”
“This first interactive collaborative meeting we had about freestanding emergency departments proved very beneficial,” Dan says. “We had the opportunity to come together and we really learned quite a bit from this experience.”
“It made me excited to have this partnership with SCL Health, to know we were combining with an organization that shares our same values and that they’re friendly, good people who want what’s best for patients,” Jared says.
The insight the Saint Joseph’s team offered them has prompted the Utah team to change plans for the two new facilities.
“In our freestanding EDs, both at Saratoga and Hurricane, we had a very open design planned for the waiting rooms and Saint Joseph’s had that too when they first opened,” Jared says.
He says that because there is such limited staffing that if the receptionist up front went in the back with a patient, the reception area would be vulnerable to potential security issues. They created a more secure area behind glass where the receptionist could work knowing that added bit of security would also give that caregiver more flexibility if he or she was temporarily needed elsewhere.
Barbara Jahn, chief operations officer for the Peaks Region
Amanda Carrillo, RN, is the clinical manager for Saint Joseph’s Freestanding Emergency Department.
“It was an exciting opportunity not only to show off all of the work we do here but to help our expanding team in Utah grow their knowledge and understanding of what a freestanding emergency department is,” she says. “I have an amazing team. So having the ability to share everything we’ve learned over the last six years was inspiring. It felt effortless and comfortable to work with the Utah visitors. They were incredibly engaged, and they genuinely wanted to know more about our operations here.”
Dallas says Barbara Jahn, chief operating officer for the Peaks Region, was there when they visited and was extremely helpful, answering their questions, and sharing insight with them.
“This is a great example of how we can learn from each other and put those insights into practice for our patients,” Barbara says. “It also demonstrates how our shared values make it so easy to unify around common goals. It was rewarding to see this exchange unfold. It was a true pleasure to host the team and we learned from each other.”