Banner Health expands technology in new Fort Collins hospital

FORT COLLINS – Julie Reisetter presses a red button in a hospital bedroom, turning on a wall-mounted television at the new Banner Fort Collins Medical Center.

Next to the television, a video camera pans throughout the bedroom. A nurse from Mesa, Ariz., appears on the television screen and asks Reisetter about the weather.

“It’s really a virtual team,” explains Reisetter, chief nursing officer for Banner’s Telehealth Services.

The technology helps Banner Health nurses nationwide communicate with hospital staff members as they work together to monitor conditions of patients using high-tech equipment and electronic medical records. The system is part of an array of technology that Banner Health executives unveiled during a tour with reporters at the new Fort Collins hospital Thursday.

The hospital’s technology includes everything from operating rooms with special light-emitting diode lighting to an imaging machine with a larger bore containing more space for patients than conventional machines.

Construction workers and hospital staff members were busy finishing the building and testing equipment Thursday afternoon. Executives say the hospital’s emergency department will begin seeing patients immediately when it opens with 22 beds April 6. In all, the 146,000-square-foot hospital will employ 175 people.

“Fort Collins is a busy place, and we’ll be busy very quickly,” said John D’Angelo, the hospital’s chief operating officer.

Construction on the hospital began in September 2013, and executives expect to eventually expand to 144 patient beds, two towers, a parking structure and medical office building as part of a 40-year plan.

The $89 million hospital on 28 acres next to Harmony Road and Lady Moon Drive is Banner’s fifth hospital in Colorado. The nonprofit also operates four clinics in Fort Collins.

The new hospital will offer emergency and intensive care, general surgery, orthopedics, labor and delivery, women’s health, pulmonology, gastroenterology, urology and other medical and surgical services.

Banner Health’s facility is the first in Northern Colorado to install the remote monitoring system called TeleAcute Care. The system expands on a similar program, called TeleICU, in which doctors and nurses monitor intensive-care patients at other Banner hospitals. Both systems are in place at the new hospital.

One nurse can monitor nearly 50 patients from another location 24 hours a day. That may seem like a lot of patients, but the system is meant to supplement care that doctors and nurses will provide onsite to identify conditions as early as possible.

The TeleAcute Care and TeleICU professionals speak directly with the medical staff members and patients through cameras, monitors and speakers located in every patient room, intervening when they detect conditions such as irregular heart rates, elevated blood pressure and reduced oxygen levels.

“Even when the doctor isn’t in the room, we have somebody monitoring,” Reisetter said.

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