Early in 2017 the Institute completed an expansion to their facilities on its Baptist Hospital campus, the design of which included additional space and equipment. It also facilitated the creation of several new, specialized programs, all focused on the Institute’s founding promise to bring together multidisciplinary healthcare teams of specialists to treat the cardiovascular care delivery system as a single entity.
“At the physician practitioner level, that’s pretty challenging because many individual practitioners are really solo entrepreneurs that are, in fact, competitive with one another, and so we’ve been able to harness those competitive forces into collaborative forces, I think, that has benefited everybody,” says Barry T. Katzen, M.D., founder and Chief Medical Executive of Miami Cardiac & Vascular Institute.
Open gallery views of interventional suites allow staff to understand that they’re working in an environment “where peer-to-peer relationships are important, and where peer-to-peer scrutiny is out in the open.” The environment is such where any type of image-guided procedure could be performed with multidisciplinary care teams working together to solve a patient’s problem.
At a TAVR (trans-catheter aortic valve replacement) meeting, for example, physicians from multiple disciplines all congregate in the large ‘fishbowl’ conference room at the Institute to evaluate patient cases, including echocardiographers, interventional cardiologists, interventional radiologists, the vascular surgery team and the imaging team.
“In traditional hospitals, the various [clinical] specialties are in silos, so the rooms may be lined up in one hallway in one department, and there may be other kinds of procedure rooms lined up in another hallway all the way across the hospital,” says Melvin. In addition to physical space and clinical specialty silos, data and IT systems are also frequently not integrated.
“Years ago, we developed a unique floor plan to provide that kind of interaction, as we affectionately call ‘working in the sunshine,’ where we have a glassed area that allows us to not only see what’s going on in every room, but to have all the physicians participate in any type of care that’s needed in those rooms. That creates an environment of collaboration rather than an environment of silos.”