A southern Indiana hospital is wrapping up an expansion project that was delayed for several years after flash flooding in 2008 caused nearly $180 million in damage.
Columbus Regional Hospital's new emergency department is scheduled to open Wednesday on the southeast side of the hospital's main building.
The entire hospital was closed for five months after the flood.
"Really everyone was affected," says spokesperson Kelsey DeClue. "Everybody was here, cleaning up, offering support, doing whatever they could."
The new 16,350-square-foot department is twice the size and designed to handle twice as many patients as the previous emergency room unit.
Hospital officials expect the new facility's opening to alleviate overcrowding in the former emergency department. The waiting room itself can comfortably fit twice as many people, and the new facility has 28 exam rooms.
After the flood damage in 2008, FEMA mandated that the hospital would be rebuilt with a flood wall to prevent similar problems in the future. DeClue says that the FEMA money went directly to the floodwalls, and the rest of the hospital renovations were funded by the hospital itself, and private donors. The hospital invested $16 million in the new department.
In addition to increasing space, the hospital also updated their healthcare technology. For example, doctors and nurses are using software called Versus to track which patients are in which rooms.
DeClue says that the hospital took in consideration what the community wanted in their emergency department.
"Patients want to be able to move through the care they're receiving in the emergency room to be as streamlined as possible, so the Versus system is a good example of that," she says.
Additions include more psychiatric rooms and Sexual Assault Nurse Evaluation service.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held last Tuesday for the facility.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.