How Do You Furnish a Hospital? Outfitting the New Patient Tower at Shady Grove Medical Center

If you’ve ever bought furniture, electronics or other equipment for your home, you know the challenges of selecting the right pieces for your living space. But purchasing equipment and furnishings for a hospital challenges a buyer on a whole different level.

Todd Cohen, Associate Vice President of Facilities and Real Estate at Adventist HealthCare, says hospital equipment purchases require a lot of thought. His team must consider factors most people never do.

“When you go to a big box store and buy a TV, for example, it’s yours,” Todd says. “You’ll use it, but few others will. In a hospital, that same TV might switch users every one-to-three days. It needs to withstand much more use.”

Not only that, he says, but the equipment needs to meet the high infection prevention standards that hospitals. For example, TVs must be enclosed so staff can sanitize them regularly.

“We have to look at everything we do through an infection-prevention lens,” Todd says. “Keeping patients safe is our No. 1 priority.”

Todd and the team have a variety of strategic purchases to make for the new Shady Grove Medical Center patient tower, including TVs.

But not everything must be new. “The patient tower will be a newly constructed building,” he says. “But we’re looking at it like a renovation. We can move many items from the current Shady Grove Medical Center into the new tower.”

Equipment in patient rooms is a great example. Double rooms at Shady Grove Medical Center will become singles, so extra beds, dressers and chairs can move into patient rooms in the new tower when it’s complete.

The new ICU in the tower will be larger and require all new equipment, but the team can repurpose items from the existing Emergency Department (ED) for the tower’s new ED.

Todd says the equipment purchasing strategy for the new tower fits into Shady Grove Medical Center’s long-term plan for buying and replacing equipment.

“We’ve been purchasing items strategically and on a schedule for a long time now,” he says. “We can predict what we’ll need and when we’ll need it. And this forward-thinking works in our favor now as we consider expanding into the new patient tower.”

The new patient tower at Shady Grove Medical Center is expected to open in 2025.