Baptist Health's New Tower Offers the Latest in Critical Care Innovation for Kids

The Borowy Family Children’s Critical Care Tower will offer not only the latest in digital health technology, but a glimpse into the future of healthcare innovation—for adults as well as children.

As Baptist Health opens the Borowy Family Children's Critical Care Tower today at the Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville and Wolfson Children's Hospital campus, visitors will marvel at the sleek design and complex technology that combine to make the seven-story tower a shining example of the evolution of pediatric healthcare.

But the real evolution won't be evident. It'll be contained inside the technology, showing up on mobile devices and dashboards, giving healthcare providers new and precise data to improve care and clinical outcomes for the health system's smallest and most fragile patients.

"This is really where the future is," says Michael Aubin, FACHE, president of Wolfson Children's Hospital and chief philanthropy officer for the Baptist Health Foundation. "We're making sure that we give our staff the tools they need to maximize outcomes."

The three-year, $224 million project puts Wolfson Children's Hospital at the pinnacle of pediatric care, offering a look not only at the latest in healthcare innovation but a glimpse of where these technology platforms and services will be going. The hospital serves a roughly New England—sized swath of northern Florida, home to more than 1.1 million children, and sees well over 1,000 admissions a year.

The seven-story, 127-suite tower, which opens today, consists of three floors devoted to neonatal intensive care patients, including a unit for micro preemies, or babies born on or before 26 weeks; two floors housing pediatric critical care patients; a neuro ICU; a cardiovascular ICU; and two beds devoted to severely burned or wounded patients. 

Michael Aubin, FACHE, president of Wolfson's Children's Hospital and chief philanthropy officer for the Baptist Health Foundation. Photo courtesy Baptist Health.

Each patient bed is connected to a digital health platform developed by Philips, with sensors and AI technology that can capture and translate at least 138 key elements of data. That data is critical to patient care, Aubin says, because most of these patients are too small or underdeveloped to support traditional wearables or sensors.

Making Use of Machine Learning Technology

This, in fact, is where a lot of the innovation is focused these days in the digital health space. Health systems and hospitals are poised to embrace new technology that captures key patient data, both inside the hospital and at home, but they want to make sure that technology analyzes and sorts that data, giving it specific value for providers. It's one thing to track and collect key physiological data, and quite another to make it meaningful.

Aubin points out that many young babies, especially those in neonatal care, present similar data, even as each baby is completely different, with different needs and concerns. A monitoring platform must recognize those differences and drill down to specific data points, identifying trends that are important but might not set off traditional alarms.

"It's very specific," he says. "And when two or three [data sets] are going in the wrong direction, we have to know about that immediately."

Those AI capabilities, Aubin says, are "the holy grail of healthcare" these days, particularly in pediatric care. And healthcare organizations that focus on pediatric care, he says, must be careful selecting those platforms.

"It's all about the software now," he says. "There are lots of innovative ideas out there right now, and there are systems that do predictive analytics but they're very niche. It's still an evolving field for pediatric ICUs."

Beyond that, it's also important to establish the right atmosphere for doctors and nurses, especially in a high-pressure area like the neonatal ICU, where stress is constant and burnout is a concern. Aubin says the potential for sensors and AI technology is great, but management must present these platforms not as a replacement for care providers but an assistant, another set of eyes and ears that allows them to improve care management and coordination.

"First of all, we don't want the machine to be telling us what to do," he says. "The first step is to make sure that [doctors and nurses] know they're not being told what to do. The machine is giving them the information they need to make those decisions and giving them all the data they've been looking for."

Innovations in Imaging

Another important innovation included in the new tower is an MRI system developed by Aspect Imaging, enabling the hospital to include imaging in the new tower instead of transporting them to another part of the hospital campus. Aubin notes that many infants in the neonatal ICU are in extremely delicate condition and can't be wheeled down to another part of the hospital for an MRI.

The Embrace Neonatal MRI platform offers several benefits, including continuous thermal support, quiet operation, continuous visual monitoring of the baby during the MRI and a fully shielded magnet, which allows caregivers and parents to be nearby during the MRI. The machine, which is housed on the fourth floor and offers easy access to the NICUs above and below, is one of only four in the world and three in the United States (the others are located at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Yale New Haven Children's Hospital).

The Embrace points to another ongoing innovation in healthcare: The development of more compact, sometimes mobile devices that enable providers to move around and deliver services to the patient, rather than requiring the patient to come to the hospital for those services. Portable MRIs may be rare now, but the growing use of portable ultrasound platforms points to the future of mobility in healthcare.

As for Wolfson, Aubin says the Embrace Neonatal MRI system gives clinicians an opportunity to capture images that couldn't be done before, thus greatly improving care for delicate newborns. The system is FDA-approved for brain scans at present, he says, with the hope that it will soon be approved for body scans.

He's also hopeful of advances in Bluetooth-enabled wearable technology that will allow the hospital to use smaller and more discrete sensors that attach to patients or their clothing, thus gradually eliminating the connected and wired devices that are so common these days in neonatal ICUs and that keep patients literally tethered to their beds.

"I'm looking to disconnect these kids from everything except the IVs that they have to have," Aubin says.

And he's especially eager to see the development of rapid genomic processing, which could lead to the quick development of treatments for sepsis and other infections which too often become fatal.

"There's a lot out there right now that will help us in the future," he says.

A Comfortable Place for Patients and Their Families

While clinical outcomes are the focus of much of this innovation, Aubin isn't forgetting about comfort —not only for the patients, but their families as well. The 127 patient suites in the new hospital are nicer than most hotel suites, with private bathrooms, wardrobes, couches that pull out into beds, kitchens and laundry facilities, and separate TVs for the kids and their parents. Considering the average length of stay for a pediatric patient is almost four weeks, it's important to make that stay as comfortable for the patients as for their often stressed-out family members, he says.

Comfort and sound suppression are important, Aubin says, not only because his patients need to be in environments that maintain sound levels at 45 decibels or lower, but because the hospital complex sits right next to I-95 (thus making access easy). Both the windows and the doors are specially designed to cut down on sound, and iPads and TVs in the room are connected to Bluetooth earbuds. The iPads and TVs are linked to a wide-ranging platform developed by the GetWell Network, offering digital patient engagement services that include entertainment, communications, and access to educational resources.

That's an important and often overlooked resource because the goal of pretty much any hospital is to send those patients home. Creating a comfortable environment for the parents and caregivers, Aubin says, gives them more time to not only be with their children, but access resources and learn what they need to know to care for their children at home.