University of Wisconsin Health - Nurse Servers
Location: Madison, Wisconsin
Project-at-a-Glance:
A large research hospital system in Madison, Wisconsin was looking for new supply and medication storage as they looked to renovate one of their hospitals over a five-year period. We helped them visualize the nurse server storage they needed — and then created the prototypes to make it a reality.
UW Health, located in Madison, Wisconsin, is the integrated health system of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The system serves more than 600,000 patients each year with approximately 1,750 physicians and 21,000 staff, spread over seven hospitals and over 80 outpatient sites. In its partnership with the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, it boasts the nation’s only combined school of medicine and public health.
The need:
Storage efficiency for today, flexibility for tomorrow
In early 2017, one of the hospitals in the UW Health system was embarking on a five-year plan to renovate its current 505-bed hospital. A small part of this hospital was being designated a “prototype wing” — an 18-bed testing ground to make sure the hospital was staying ahead of the game when it came to patient-centered products and solutions.
The Project Manager of Planning, Design, and Construction, having seen FlowCARE’s designs for both our pass-through and pull-out/tilt-down nurse servers, wanted us to customize a solution for the hospital that would provide them with the efficiency they needed today when it came to decentralized supply and medication storage as well as ensure their storage solutions would be flexible enough to serve them for the next two to three decades.
A phased approach, with testing and feedback
Over the course of three months, we worked with the Project Manager and his team to create, design, and budget options that would meet those two requirements. We manufactured a working model, drove it to Madison from our facility in Omaha, Nebraska, and installed it into the prototype wing.
After several weeks of usage and feedback by UW Health nurses, hospital executives, and the architects on the project, designs were tweaked — and a full 18 units for the prototype wing were produced. These units were engineered to provide flexibility in the short term, as each group of nurses wanted to store supplies differently to determine which was the best way of storage for future phases.
At the end of 2018, after a full year of the nurse servers being in use, we got additional feedback, which was, “don’t change a thing” — although we did make a few tweaks to incorporate more baskets into the nurse servers, and creating new pre-engineered and fabricated projects that would make supplies easier to access in UW Health’s procedure rooms and the PPE cabinets in the alcoves.
After a full year of the nurse servers being in use, we got additional feedback, which was, “don’t change a thing”.
Continued installation and progress
We’re in the midst of Phase 3 of the project, and after working through this project with UW Health for over three years, the ability for us to present them with an existing project that they could test drive and make changes to proved to be an invaluable time-saver. It allowed them to see what was already there in terms of nurse storage capabilities, and then see what was additionally possible.
Related Projects
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Brookings Health System
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