New hospital campus ushering in big changes

MURRAY — When Intermountain Healthcare's newest — and by far its biggest — hospital opens Oct. 29, it will bring big changes to the health-care landscape along the Wasatch Front.

The Intermountain Medical Center is actually five different centers, each focusing on a particular area of care, placed mostly side-by-side on a sprawling 100-acre campus near 5300 South and State Street. The $560 million facility has been 10 years in the making, according to H. Gary Pehrson, CEO of Intermountain's Urban Central region, who has overseen the project since its inception.

IMC includes a women's and newborn center, heart-lung center, patient tower and trauma facilities, outpatient center and cancer specialty center. It has a central lab, its own utility plant and an education center, and it sits just a few hundred feet from a TRAX station.

The process has not been simple, Pehrson said, because it involved breaking with "big box" hospital tradition, convincing everyone, from the physician and nurse to the board member and potential patients, that the design they've always known is not necessarily how things have to be. Pehrson and John Rich, vice president for facilities development, had become increasingly taken with a "centers of excellence" concept — individual buildings that could focus on what they had to offer patients.

The concept, said Pehrson, keeps the patient firmly in mind, from simplifying where to go to improving parking. He's convinced it's the future of patient care. And it's really nice for employees as well, he added.

He was surprised how many people didn't see it that way, at first.

"They were used to what they're used to" at LDS Hospital, said Pehrson. "There was a lot of push-back from the staff. We had to do studies, like time and motion, walking from one point to another, to prove the efficiencies were better."

By locating the buildings near, but mostly separate from each other (they are connected on one level and share a long utility tunnel that moves essentials like steam and soft water and glycol), patients will find closer parking, less walking to where they need care and a more intimate, relaxed setting for healing, according to David Grauer, current CEO and administrator of Cottonwood Hospital, who will hold the same title at the new IMC when it opens.