A hospital on the Massachusetts South Shore is taking a new approach to treats its patients amid a growing caseload.
Beth Israel Deaconess Plymouth just launched a new unit to relieve pressure on its emergency department.
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The 25-bed unit was assembled in Pennsylvania and installed at the hospital, and now it's up and running as the new clinical decision unit — a place for patients from the ER to go if they are in need of more testing or observation.
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"It helps our emergency department by allowing them to take a patient that they know they need to hold, move them out of the ER into this clinical decision unit, and open a space for someone who's in the waiting room to come in," hospital president Kevin Coughlin said.
The project, which had a price tag over $14 million, took two years to come together — a timeframe that was cut in half by having the unit prebuilt out-of-state.
"They built it, they took it apart, they shrink wrap it, they put it on trucks and they build it with a massive crane," Coughlin said, adding that this was the first location in Massachusetts to use this prefabricated design.
The CDU is the first of three capital projects planned at the hospital over the next five years. A planned emergency department expansion would about double that unit in size.
"Our emergency room was built in 1993," Coughlin said. "It was designed to see about 25,000 patients per year. We’re seeing almost 50,000 per year in that space now."
While Plymouth has seen significant population growth in recent years, Coughlin said there are other factors contributing to increasing caseloads at emergency departments across the board.
"During the pandemic, people didn’t receive the routine care they should’ve been receiving, because they couldn’t go to the doctor," he said. "Part of it is the number of physicians that have decided they were going to retire because of the stress of the job."
BID Plymouth is also planning to expand its offerings in hematology and oncology.
