New Renown tower focuses on patient privacy

Glass walls around nursing stations keep conversations about patients' conditions private.

Walls at the entrance to the emergency room keep curious bystanders away.

Electronic medical records systems reduce the possibility that paperwork with confidential information will slip away.

The new $240 million Tahoe Tower at Renown Regional Medical Center is a highly visible addition to Reno's skyline, but it's also designed to keep secrets.

That, a hospital executive says, reflects both the growing legal requirements surrounding patient privacy as well as an increased sensitivity to the issue by medical professionals.

"This may be a big state, but it's a small town," says Newton Chase, director of facility services for Renown.

As he walked reporters through the 10-story building last week, Chase returned time and again to the need to protect patients' privacy.

Corridors in the new tower, for instance, will be limited to patients and medical staff reducing the possibility that a patient will accidentally encounter an acquaintance. Family members and visitors will traverse the new hospital tower in a separate set of corridors.

Television displays that help nurses track patients' progress through the emergency room won't list patients by name. That way, no one glancing at a monitor can learn who is being treated.

Even the most basic decision about the tower's layout the decision that each floor would include 38 private rooms reflects the privacy push, Chase says.

The emphasis on privacy got additional impetus when federal regulations requiring confidentiality of patient records came into effect in late 2003, about the same time that Renown then known as Washoe Medical was deeply involved with planning for the new tower.

But the new law, Chase says, was only one manifestation of a philosophical shift toward more privacy in medicine, and that shift is reflected throughout the design of the tower.

Other legal concerns, meanwhile, pressure hospital designers in a seemingly opposite direction. Video cameras installed in new operating rooms, for instance, make a record of every step taken by surgeons a self-protective step by a hospital operating in a litigious society.

Renown is scheduled to take possession of the building on July 7, and hospital executives expect to begin using it for patient care in September. The general contractor is a joint venture of Clark & Sullivan Constructors of Sparks and Sellen Construction, a Seattle company experienced in hospital work.

Initially budgeted in early 2004 at $220 million for a 12-story tower, the project now will cost $240 million for 10 stories.

And that, Chase says, reflects widespread price inflation in construction materials as the project was built. A hospital uses extensive amounts of copper piping, for instance, and copper is one of the commodities that have posted the biggest price gains in the past couple of years.

One piece of the plan remained unchanged: When the new facility opens, two floors the fifth and the ninth will be left unfinished.

That leaves Renown with some growing room. More importantly, it allows the hospital to configure those two floors to reflect the current thinking in hospital design whenever they're finished.

"Health-care is always changing," says Chase.