A new Colorado hospital opens this weekend. It’s built with the lessons of COVID in mind.

The art is hung. The toilets flush. The X-ray machines are (finally) assembled.

On Saturday, barring any last-minute hiccups, Intermountain Health’s Lutheran Medical Center in Wheat Ridge will shut down its current location and move 3 miles west to a brand new, $680 million campus. It’s the first major hospital relocation in Colorado in years, and the new facility showcases how the COVID-19 pandemic has forced health systems to rethink what a hospital must be able to do.

Take, for instance, the patient rooms. There’s 226 of them, and each one comes with a nifty sliding supply cabinet that nurses can pull out to restock from the hallway.

This means nurses won’t need to disturb patients as often. But the feature serves another purpose. If the patient inside the room has a contagious bug, it keeps staff from having to load up on protective gear just to refill the tissue boxes.

Here’s another COVID-inspired design choice, taken from a pandemic when hospitals often worried about running out of capacity: Every patient room can be converted into a critical care room if needed.

“An outcome of the pandemic is we need the flexibility to take care of really sick patients everywhere,” said Casey Bogenschutz, the executive who is overseeing Saturday’s move.

Orchestrating the move

Bogenschutz is Lutheran Medical Center’s director of strategic initiatives, but that title severely undersells both the strategy and initiative the job requires.

At 6 a.m. on Saturday, the current location — at West 38th Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard, where it has stood in some form since 1905 — will stop accepting new patients. The new hospital, which is just off Interstate 70 near the interchange with Colorado 58 in a development known as Clear Creek Crossing, will begin accepting patients.

Then the dance begins.

Starting at 8 a.m., a fleet of about 20 ambulances will begin running loops transporting patients already in the hospital to the new campus. The hospital is expecting to move about 180 patients, in a precisely timed choreography, one patient moving every eight to 10 minutes.

“We will have a down-to-the-minute plan for each patient,” Bogenschutz said.

On a recent day, Bogenschutz led The Sun on a tour of the new hospital, weaving through a maze of corridors and rooms, some with signage still TBD. Outside each room hung a list, attached with blue painter’s tape, of all the items needing to be placed inside. Bed, check. Toilet paper, check.

There were large televisions and “digital whiteboards” — screens with information for both patients and staff — to be connected. Bathrooms in the patient rooms were built as prefabricated pods at a factory in Phoenix, then shipped to Colorado on a truck and lifted by crane into place.

The operating rooms were just days away from intensive cleaning to render them sterile and ready for surgery.

Why build a new hospital?

In addition to COVID, the facility has been designed with other modern afflictions in mind. Doors connect all the rooms for trauma patients, allowing a doctor treating people from a mass-casualty incident such as a mass shooting to move quickly from patient to patient.

Bogenschutz said the new hospital has been organized for efficiency. MRI and CT scanners are positioned nearby the patients who will need them. The room numbering is orderly and intuitive, allowing a nurse to know exactly where they are in the hospital at any time. There’s an organized flow as patients move from one treatment area to the next — no more long walks or elevator rides to connect commonly used areas.

This, Bogenschutz said, is the best argument for building a new hospital, instead of simply renovating the old one.

“It doesn’t have the adjacencies that are required in the industry,” she said of the current hospital. “You make it work, but when you upgrade you can build things the way you want them.”