Baptist Health's Wolfson Children's Hospital to unveil new critical care tower with AI-powered tech

Jacksonville-based Wolfson Children’s Hospital, of Baptist Health, will soon unveil a new building dedicated to neonatal and pediatric critical care. 

The 7-floor building, named Borowy Family Children’s Critical Care Tower, will feature 127 beds and 122 suites equipped with new AI-powered tech. It will include a nenonatal ICU, pediatric critical care, a pediatric neuro-ICU— the first in the state, according to Wolfson—a cardiovascular ICU and a burn and wound care unit.

The hope was to “build the best critical care center in the world,” Michael Aubin, president of Wolfson Children’s Hospital, told Fierce Healthcare. The hospital tore down a parking garage to make space for the tower. Before building the structure, hospital leadership, along with architects and tech partners, visited other buildings, reviewed plans of new construction projects and talked to other hospital leadership on the features of their facilities. Wolfson’s team also requested input on expectations from families.

Taking into account the region’s risk of flooding, the building sits several feet off the ground and houses a bunker on the top floor for the hospital’s servers. Its doors and glass are made of special material to protect vulnerable babies from loud noise, like a nearby highway. Making the subunits and floors easy to navigate between was top of mind. The building is connected to others, like a high-risk birthing center, for quick transition of babies in need of critical care. Couplette rooms will also be available for new mothers to stay with their babies.

“We’re trying to cut the miles down and keep the time with the patients to the maximum,” Aubin said.

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The variety of subunits available is enabled by the hospital’s major reach, Aubin explained—with more than one million children around north Florida and south Georgia, Wolfson’s sees about 110,000 unique patients annually. Thanks to those figures the hospital is able to offer 250 specialists across 42 different specialties, Aubin said.

The building features a significant expansion of space not only in terms of beds, but also to accommodate parents staying overnight. Units like the cardiac ICU will be equipped with double beds, a private bathroom, a TV and a wardrobe, Aubin said. The hospital “tried to build the rooms around the fact that we want the parents to be there for as long as they can possibly be there.”

Wolfson Children's Hospital new tower
(Wolfson Children's Hospital)

The rooms were also built extra-large to be flexible for future use.

“You don’t build buildings for five years, you build them for 50 years or more,” Aubin said.

One of the biggest selling points is Borowy’s new technological capabilities, enabled by partners like Philips. 

“The holy grail of anything in medicine is how do you predict the future of what’s going to happen to your patient,” Aubin said. And the benefit of using predictive analytics on a neonatal population is the similarity of their conditions, he said. 

The predictive analytics system designed by Philips will be the first official launch of this magnitude, Aubin said. It will initially be deployed to 100 suites and will leverage algorithms built by a neonatal specialist to enable clinicians to forecast trends and predict outcomes in infants. 

The technology monitors trends in babies' bodies, using certain parameters as benchmarks. A touch screen attached to each bed will display indicators—yellow or red, for instance—depending on the trajectory of the patient’s condition, alerting physicians accordingly. A physician will be able to access all data points in one place on the screen, an advantage over the siloed parameters of a traditional electronic medical record (EMR).

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“The adult world is the 'Pac-Man' of all technology. It gobbles it up, and it gobbles up the dollars for research,” Aubin said. It takes dedicated collaboration with companies working in a niche to move the needle. Baptist Health of Northeast Florida recently entered into a 10-year agreement with Philips, with the aim of helping to advance the technology’s capabilities, Aubin said. 

Another unique capability available at Borowy will be the Embrace Neonatal MRI, developed by Aspect Imaging, which only exists at three other locations in the world, according to Aubin. It is a quiet and compact neonatal neuroimaging system, with a magnet that is self-shielding—a major step in facilitating continuous care for vulnerable babies who need to be attached to complex equipment around the clock. Parents can also stay in the room during scans for this reason.

The MRI also offers continuous thermal support to premature babies and a video display through which they can be watched. The technology will be accessible from all three floors of the neonatal ICU.

The first phase of Borowy’s opening begins Feb. 22. The entire tower will be fully operational by the end of April.