by Melanie Roybal
Daily Lobo
UNM Hospital's new Outpatient and Surgery Imaging Building, unveiled last week, provides patients greater accessibility to outpatient services, surgery and imaging services such as CT scans and MRIs.
The new 38,000 square foot freestanding building is located at 1213 University Blvd. It contains six operating rooms, 23 recovery bays, a pain clinic, two mammography rooms, a CT scan room, two ultrasound rooms and a future MRI suite.
Jennifer Riordan, a UNM Health Sciences Center spokeswoman, said the new facility will make it easier for patients to receive specialized care and access the hospital's many facilities without having to come to the main building.
"For example, someone with breast cancer who needs a CT scan or a mammography can have it done under one roof at the OSI Building," she said.
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UNM Hospital is the only level-one trauma center in the state and is the primary care provider for most of New Mexico's indigent patients, Riordan said. Outpatient surgeries make up 40 percent of the hospital's business, she added.
Riordan said prior to the opening of the new facility, all surgical procedures were handled at the hospital. But as it began to experience a high growth in its surgical loads, she said, the hospital's 16 available operating rooms became increasingly congested.
"We realized we were constrained by space in the hospital's operating rooms and that outpatient surgery referrals were being bumped by trauma and other emergency cases," said Steve McKernan, CEO of UNM Hospital and Health Science Center and associate vice president for Clinical Operations.
"In order to provide good access for both scheduled and emergency patients, a separate outpatient location became the obvious solution," he said. "The same problem was occurring in our hospital imaging facility and therefore an outpatient site for those services such as MRIs and ultrasounds was incorporated into the plan."
"Large portions of the faculty in anesthesiology, surgery, orthopedics, OB-GYN and radiology will be using the facility," McKernan said. "These same faculty will still use the hospital facilities for inpatient and emergency cases and studies."
Riordan said the hospital wants to increase its annual surgical procedure capacity by treating outpatients in the new facility, which will free up the hospital's operating room space for trauma patients.
"Our goal is to make this all about the patient and the options that they have to make it easier for them to access our facility and our programs," she said.
Riordan said one benefit for UNM medical students is the opportunity to do outpatient surgeries at the new facility.
"The facility increases our opportunity to serve more patients in New Mexico and Albuquerque and provides more learning opportunities for our students," Riordan said.
The UNM Board of Regents approved the building's location in 1999 as part of a strategic facility planning effort. Construction began in January 2002. The total project cost including construction, equipment and furnishings was $15.8 million.
The building generates its own steam and has its own emergency electrical generator. It will also be the telecommunications headquarters for future development of its neighboring UNM properties.
"The architect carefully reviewed program needs with all constituents such as physicians, nurses and technologists who would be using the facility and incorporated all ideas into a functional and efficient, as well as beautiful, facility," McKernan said.
