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North Sunflower's new swing-bed room features Wellness equipment.

RULEVILLE — North Sunflower Medical Center may be housed in an old building, but a recent face-lift is having patients feeling like VIPs and physicians wanting to come on board.

Five rooms in the 25-bed critical access hospital were recently renovated by Wellness Environments, a Nashville-based company with offices in Minneapolis and Memphis, known for its sleek room package that provides a healing ambience for patients and better work environment for staff.

Wellness uses the room's basic infrastructure but installs an entirely new room over it complete with wall panels that attach to existing walls, floors, ceilings, furnishings, bathrooms and even paintings. And, although the rooms provide top-notch equipment, they are almost like buying a hospital room in a box set.

Billy Marlow, North Sunflower's administrator, said losing patients is what prompted the move toward Wellness rooms.

"Our hospital is a Halliburton hospital built in the 1950s," Marlow said. "When we converted to a critical access hospital, we got aggressive going after swing bed patients. The physicians in Bolivar County had sent patients to us and then quit. When I called to find out what was going on, they said the patients were well taken care of here. We fed them well, they loved the food, but they didn't like the old rooms. So we decided to do something about it. Now they're back to sending patients — and the patients love it.

"We've already renovated 12 of our 25 rooms, but not to the point the Wellness rooms are. We'll do seven more with Wellness. It doesn't cost anything extra for the patient. If one is empty, we put the next patient that comes in, in it. If one empties out and they want to move, we don't have a problem moving them to one of those rooms."

Each of the Wellness rooms is private with seating for family and visitors. Other equipment includes the Nurse Station, an acrylic one-piece unit with an electric sensor faucet for hand washing, a memo holder for tracking patient information, a lockable door, and digital clock and glove dispenser. The Clinical Information Center enables staff to perform in-room charting, which has been shown to reduce recording errors. And all rooms have a private bath, some with a vanity/toilet combination.

Rick Linder, Wellness regional vice president, said the first six-and-a half years of the company were spent in research and development to determine what types of rooms that patients and professionals wanted and needed in a hospital room.

"From that research came the rooms we have today," Linder said. "Everything you see in the room, whether the furnishings or walls, have a radius to them; they have rounded edges. That makes them easier to clean and easier to maintain because there are no corners. We also did the emergency department at Gilmore Hospital in Amory. We did six treatment rooms and two cardiac trauma rooms."

Linder said the rooms are ideal for rural hospitals that need updating but might not be able to afford a full-scale renovation.

"The benefit of that is these rooms are considered capital equipment rather than traditional construction; therefore you can do some interesting things financially, such an operational leases on the rooms. If you were to purchase those rooms, they would cost in the neighborhood of $325,000," said Linder, who quickly added that even though that may sound a little high, "it's very reasonable when you consider that everything you need in a hospital room, including the furniture, is included except for the bed itself."

North Sunflower is financing its rooms through a five-year operating lease, so it can free up capital funds for use elsewhere.

"We're paying $6,800 a month for the five rooms," Marlow said. "If they stay full, it's worth it. At the end of the five-year lease, we can either purchase the equipment at a fair market price or return it. An operating lease made a lot of sense to us for many reasons. It allows us to incur most of the expense of the project over a five-year term versus 10 years with a capital lease. Plus, rather than allocating costs throughout the entire hospital, an operating lease enables us to assign costs directly to the departments being benefited, which in our case happens to be areas with the highest Medicare usage. That gives us better reimbursement and helps our short and long-term cash flow."


March 2007

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