by
Joanna Padovano, Reporter | March 13, 2012
From the March 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Once a large enough room is designated for the construction of a
Saint Mary’s E. L. Wiegand
Endovascular Surgery Suite,
photo courtesy of STERIS
hybrid OR, its infrastructure must be altered. “They have to put lead in the walls and ceiling, depending on what is in the adjacent spaces,” says Werner. “For instance, if there are offices above the room, then they have to protect the people sitting above that room from radiation just as they would adjacent wall space. So it makes the real estate more expensive because you have to prepare for the environment, not to mention the usual laminar airflow and clean surfaces [standards] that any OR is held to these days.”
Not only does a hybrid OR need to be big; it also needs to have a well-conceived floor plan and easy-to-move equipment in order to maximize workflow efficiency.
“The criticality is not room size, but the layout of the room, so that you create those paths for what we call ‘circulation,’” says Palmer.
“The most important things in any hybrid OR are patient access, anesthesia access and room for operating,” says Sudhir Kulkarni, segment director of hybrid OR for Siemens Healthcare. “When necessary, the systems should be getting out of the way very quickly and very easily.”
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There are many upsides to building a hybrid OR, one of which is that it allows a hospital to attract high-end clinicians, who, in turn, bring in more patients.
The downside, of course, is the depths at which hospitals must reach into their pockets to fund the project. “The cost of equipping a hybrid OR suite can vary from as little as $150,000 to up to several million, depending on how modern the surgical and imaging equipment is at the hospital,” says Hoffman. “New construction can easily double that.”
According to Hoffman, although a hospital will need to dish out a large lump of cash to construct a hybrid OR, they will most likely break even on their investment within the first few years. “By providing one operating room where more medical specialties can perform procedures with all the specialized equipment and products that these surgical procedures require, the hybrid OR can actually reduce the demand for multiple specialty OR rooms,” he says. “By allowing medical specialty teams to treat the patient without the need to transport the patient, complications can be reduced and outcomes improved.”
