Hugh Brown

What does the future of health care look like in Georgetown?

I think a lot about the future of health care because as the only hospital in the city limits of Georgetown, I feel a significant responsibility to my community and my friends and neighbors to make sure that whatever [health care] looks like, the need is met in a convenient way. I think the future of health care in Georgetown looks very similar to what we are seeing nationally, and that is increased scrutiny on quality. There is going to be lots more transparency so that patients can make choices based on outcomes and based on processes.

I think patients will rightfully require the providers that they are going to [patronize] to follow what is known to be best practices and to be able to present that they have outcomes that are as good or better than what [patients] could get if they went outside of the area. We have a very astute population with high expectations. I anticipate that we will see more providers enter the market as the population grows, [especially] those providers who take care of the type of people moving to Georgetown—older and active [adults].

How does St. David’s Georgetown take advantage of being a part of St. David’s HealthCare?

It’s actually very rare that we are not able to take care of something a patient needs. Thus this [intensive care unit] is under construction because we recognized there was a need for greater critical care capabilities. We did find ourselves having to transfer some critical care patients to other St. David’s facilities because we didn’t have the capacity or the technology. We’re going to solve that with this particular project. But we do have a very tightly integrated network.

We have intentionally resourced the system to make sure whatever we don’t have we can actually get to at another St. David’s facility.

What are the hospital’s plans to build an entrance to the hospital from the new I-35 frontage road?

The engineering plans are almost complete. We contracted with [the Texas Department of Transportation], and we have paid them to build the section of the road that will actually connect to the new access road. [TxDOT] anticipates that they will have that completed by the end of the summer.

The goal would be to have the full access [road] completed by the latter part of November this year. … The city, the county and TxDOT have worked really well with us recognizing the public safety issue that this road is going to solve.

Eventually we will take all of the buildings [around the hospital] away, and it will be additional parking and a helicopter pad. We would expect to start on some of that parking lot work in the latter part of next year. A lot of that will be driven by continued growth as we need more parking.

What other projects are you working on?

Our top priorities would be to make the most of the new ICU. Now that we have the critical care capacity, we are going to [look] at the kind of surgical procedures that we are able to do with the expanded critical care backup.

We will be expanding our cardiology capabilities. The next logical step would be to add some [catheterization] labs.

We [also] see a lot of pediatric patients in our emergency department. … At some point, we would consider having a [neonatal intensive care unit]. Right now we can have a NICU ambulance here in a very short amount of time … and get [those patients] to [another hospital] very rapidly without a challenge, but it’s less convenient to the patients and families.