Dan Robinson, CEO of UCHealth Longs Peak Hospital in Longmont
Slip on this headset, and let me take you on a virtual tour of Longmont’s new hospital.
We’re now about six months away from the official opening of UCHealth Longs Peak Hospital, but hundreds of people already have jumped on the chance to take a look around the hospital via virtual reality.
We have been so excited to open this new UCHealth hospital, providing excellent care close to home for patients in the greater Longmont area, that we just couldn’t wait until the hospital opened to give everyone a sneak preview.
Patients, residents, business leaders and community physicians have been taking these virtual tours for a couple months now, using a virtual reality headset to look around a number of rooms in the hospital, from an operating room and an emergency department exam room to an intensive care unit room and a labor-and-delivery room.
The tours have been a fun way to show people what the new hospital will look like, but they are just a small taste of what lies ahead. Longs Peak Hospital is going to be like no hospital you’ve seen before.
The state-of-the-art facility on the northwest corner of Highway 119 and County Line Road actually will serve as a model for future hospitals as it will be filled with some of the latest and best technology to truly innovate health care.
We’ve designed the new hospital to be as connected as possible, which means all patient care records and information will be recorded in real-time, making it an efficient system that fosters excellent coordination of care.
Imagine a nurse using a mobile app on a handheld device to record documentation right at the patient’s bedside. Or imagine wearable, wireless technology that automatically records a patient’s key vitals into the electronic health record, providing more real-time feedback for our clinicians and alerting them of any problems immediately. That’s just beginning.
We’re also offering a higher level of advanced care and consultations with nationally-renowned experts throughout the UCHealth system through telemedicine. If our team of health care providers needs a consultation with a highly-specialized expert – a specialist who wouldn’t normally see patients in a community hospital – we can tap into the expertise of experts throughout the system, including providers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and get an immediate consultation. We also will have telehealth systems specifically designed to help patients who may be experiencing strokes or behavioral health needs.
As a patient, you’ll have a tablet that you will be able to use to keep up with your medical care, learn more about your prescriptions and even order the meal that will be brought to your room.
All of these technologies will help us be more efficient and better able to track and coordinate patient care, and they’ll also enable our clinical staff to better focus on our number one priority: our patients.
We have spent the past year building a team that can provide extraordinary patient care. We have many of those people in place already, and in the upcoming months, we will continue to fill other positions with some of the best care providers in our state. We also are proud to have experienced, trusted physicians who work with us at Longmont Clinic and at other medical clinics throughout the greater Longmont area who know the community well and are looking forward to working with us at Longs Peak Hospital.
Our goal is to bring together the best people and systems to provide you with the most advanced care and best possible experience.
If you haven’t seen the new hospital through the virtual reality headsets we’ve had at gatherings and events in the area, I hope you’ll attend one of the open house events that we’ll be hosting this summer where you’ll have a chance to do so. Until then, I invite you to check out a short video preview of what the hospital will look like at http://bit.ly/LPHview.
Dan Robinson is the CEO of UCHealth Longs Peak Hospital in Longmont.
