Greater Regional approves $500,000 in purchases

With acknowledgement of Greater Regional expanding over recent years, the hospital will make new purchases to accommodate growth.

Three capital purchases were approved during Greater Regional Health’s board of trustees meeting on Monday. Totals for all three will reach just under $500,000 and are already outlined in GRH’s capital budget.

GRH will purchase new firewalls for the hospital’s data servers, new medical base stations and devices for sleep studies and new flooring for the Medical Arts Plaza. Good news came with all purchases either being offset through outside funding or with lower-than-expected bids.

Network and Systems Analyst Ryan Cook introduced new firewalls and a management console for the hospital’s data servers. Cook introduced the topic by saying the previous firewalls, purchased in 2020, were reaching maximum capacity and were insufficient with the hospital’s size.

As the hospital has expanded, this max capacity was causing issues with the data servers. In recent times, the system would need regular restarts and sometimes would need to temporarily shutdown in the middle of the day.

“Everything we do anymore is over internet connections,” Cook said. “We just have to have just the throughput to go with it all.”

The firewalls would need to be reset at the Creston location, as well as GRH’s rural and DR sites. Cook said replacing all systems in these locations at once is a better option for system consistency.

Updated systems will give GRH better visibility on network traffic. An additional updated management console will also provide smoother operations. The systems have an expected lifespan of five years.

Chief of Staff Matthew Epp said the new system could boost productivity. With a staff of 450 hospital employees working with the system, a smoother, faster connection speed would help.

“I’m just going to hypothesize that, for me in my 24-hour shift, I think this is a 5-6% productivity improvement for myself,” Epp said. “If you put that across the board, physician or nurse, I’m guessing 10% productivity in our workforce. It’ll be recouped in our total cost.”

Total cost for the upgraded firewalls and the management will run about $358,000. Part of this cost will go toward three years of tech support, costing $122,723. The board approved the purchase.

Cook said the hospital could offset up to 65% of the costs through Universal Service Administrative Co. funding. The federal program has been a routine source for GRH, which Cook said he’s expecting GRH will continue to receive funding into 2025. USAC funding previously funded GRH’s previous firewall system in 2020.

Respiratory Therapy Director Katy Brown introduced purchasing new Nox Medical sleep study base stations and home devices. These new stations will fill GRH’s new sleep lab and update the devices that are out of life.

Four base stations will be purchased for the sleep lab’s three rooms (one will be used as an emergency replacement) as well as eight home devices and relevant software. Brown said this was “all we need” for GRH to perform in-lab studies and at-home sleep testing.

Brown noted how at-home testing was expanding at GRH, with additional tests performed recently at the hospital. The new devices would allow for more data collection which wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

“We see [in an average month] about 20 in-lab tests and 25-30 at-home,” Brown said.

GRH had requested $139,714 in their estimate for the systems, but received a bid of $111,314. Brown said the original estimate was “overshot.” The board approved the purchase of the devices at the $111,314 price.

Flooring for GRH’s Medical Arts Plaza was also approved. Introducing the purchase in place of Facilities Director Matt Buck was Chief Clinic Officer Carol Eckels.

This purchase was discussed during June’s meeting. The cost for updating the flooring was estimated at about $45,000, but a bid of $28,534 was offered and approved. Flooring will be replaced on the main floor from the lab to the top of the link around urgent care.