West Kendall Baptist Hospital Opens Its Doors
WEST KENDALL (CBS4) — The first all-new hospital built in Miami-Dade County in 35 years officially opened its doors Wednesday.
West Kendall Baptist Hospital is located on a 30-acre property in the Kendall Town Center at SW 162 Ave. and 96th Street. It's the only new hospital built from the "ground up" since Kendall Regional Medical Center debuted in 1975.
Focused on patient and family-centered care, West Kendall Baptist also is the first South Florida hospital designed and constructed with "Green" LEED (Leadership Energy and Environmental Design) building standards. The hospital was also built to withstand a Category 5 hurricane with winds of 180 mph. The building will be self-sustainable for a minimum of five days following a severe weather event.
Large windows adorn the hospital to help save on lighting and energy. Fax machines in the Emergency Department are paperless, the faxes deposit directly into the computer. Outside there are bike racks for employees to bike to work. There's even a plug- in station for electrical cars.
Technology is also a big factor at the new hospital. There are computer stations next to every bed in all the rooms. This is supposed to help doctors and nurses to spend more time in patients' rooms taking their notes and save on paper.
Every patient room is private at the new West Kendall Baptist Hospital. Each room includes a flat screen television with special features.
"It's got on demand movies available to the patients and also it hooks into our room service system," explained Jason Bell, the Business Projects Analysts for the hospital. "So patients are no longer having to wait for that tray to come around at 6 o'clock at night. If you are not hungry at that time you no longer have to eat at that time."
Some of the rooms also include a new device called a Maxi-Sky. It is a machine that allows nurses to easily lift patients up to 600 pounds and take them to the bathroom or simply change their position.
West Kendall Baptist Hospital is a teaching hospital with surgical, emergency, maternity and diagnostic units. The four-story, 282,000-square-foot facility accommodates 133 licensed acute care inpatient beds and private patient rooms, and is expecting to receive 40,000 emergency room visits annually.
"It's actually Baptist Health's first academic hospital in partnership with FIU's College of Medicine," said Javier Hernandez-Lichtl, the hospital CEO.
The hospital campus includes an adjacent four-story, 63,000-square-foot Medical Arts Building for physician offices with an outpatient diagnostic clinic and imaging center on the first floor.
