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Name any feature or amenity at Mercy Medical Center – West Lakes, and Dan Aten can probably list at least a half-dozen reasons it was included in the design, along with a few stories about how his staff debated the merits and potential drawbacks.

Aten, the administrator of the new West Des Moines hospital, proudly introduced the 82-bed facility to the media and employees during tours held last week. Inside, construction workers scrambled to finish final details to meet a Sept. 4 deadline to complete the nearly $100 million project. Scheduled to open at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 8, the hospital is being built to replace Mercy’s East Side hospital, Mercy Capitol, which closes at midnight on Sept. 7.

Mercy West Lakes is expected to handle three times as many patients, on average, as the underutilized Mercy Capitol.

“Many days, Mercy Capitol had space available when Mercy downtown and (Iowa) Methodist (Medical Center) were both (sending patients to other emergency rooms) and had patients lining the halls overnight waiting for beds,” Aten said. “Nobody, or I should say not enough, people wanted to go to Iowa Lutheran (Hospital) or Mercy Capitol.”

Patients at Mercy Capitol will be given the option to transfer to the new hospital, or to one of the hospitals near downtown if that’s more convenient for them, Aten said.

Located at 1601 60th St., Mercy’s new hospital is the first of two that will open this year in West Des Moines. Mercy’s competitor, Iowa Health – Des Moines, is scheduled to open Methodist West Hospital, just one block to the northwest, in early October.

Mercy estimates that 320 physicians have offices within a three-block radius of its new hospital, which made the location particularly convenient for the doctors who will see patients there. It hired approximately 250 additional employees to staff the facility; about two-thirds of the Mercy Capitol staff opted to work at the new hospital, and the remainder chose to transfer to Mercy’s main campus near downtown Des Moines.

Mercy spokesman Gregg Lagan said some additional staff will initially rotate between Mercy’s main campus and West Lakes as patient volumes are assessed to determine whether more staff should be hired.

West Lakes will operate an emergency department, but because it is a community hospital and not a tertiary-care facility, it will transfer trauma cases and patients requiring more complex procedures, such as open-heart surgery, neurosurgery and neonatal intensive care, to the main hospital.

The seven-floor hospital, which is licensed by the state for 146 patient beds, will open with its two top floors unfinished. Mercy plans to finish those floors, which would add the remaining 64 patient rooms, as demand requires.

The plan to open with 82 beds stems from an agreement reached in June 2007 with Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield. The health-care insurer had opposed the hospital, saying it would spur increased use of medical care and increase health-care costs. Under the 10-year agreement, Mercy agreed to accept significantly lower reimbursement rates from Wellmark for services provided at the new hospital than it receives for care provided at Mercy Capitol. In return, Wellmark dropped a lawsuit seeking to block the hospital from opening. Wellmark reached a similar agreement with Iowa Health – Des Moines in 2007 for Methodist West Hospital.

The West Lakes project will likely end up over budget, but within about 1.5 percent of the target, Aten said. As of last week, Mercy had spent $99.6 million of its $99.8 million budget for the project; a year ago it had a cushion of $3.5 million for contingencies, he said. “I’ve got about $1.5 million in additional requests, and I’ve got $200,000 to work with,” he noted.

Mercy involved more than 200 small groups of its medical staff in the design of West Lakes, including visits to the facility early in the construction phase to tweak the design and working with mock-up rooms built at Mercy Capitol.

“It’s finding evidence about what works best,” Aten said, “and then designing it according to that evidence, and then involving the staff over and over to move things around and say, ‘That’s not the right place for that,’ or ‘This would make a lot more sense if we could do it this way.'”

For instance, because surveys found that patients become frustrated when they’re told they’re in the wrong place to register, registration desks are located at each department along the single main-floor hallway. “We always wanted to be able to say, ‘You’re in the right place; please step forward,'” Aten said.

The hospital has also incorporated many patient safety features. Some were as simple as installing an extra sink in each patient room just a few steps from the bed, along with sinks and hand-sanitizing stations in the hallways, to help reduce the incidence of hospital-based infections. And because 95 percent of patient falls occur between the bed and the bathroom, handrails are installed inside patient rooms as well as the hallway.

Mercy claims to be the first hospital in the state to install patient lifts in each patient room and surgical suite. The ceiling-mounted devices, which can handle up to 600 pounds, allow nurses to safely lift patients from their beds, using a sling that hooks onto the motorized arm.

Another new feature of the hospital: Expectant mothers will stay in the same room for labor, delivery, recovery and post-partum care, rather than being sent to another floor after delivery as they are at Mercy’s main campus. That feature will provide families a choice of which approach they prefer to have, Aten said.

Aten said the West Lakes hospital, which as of the middle of last week already had 17 surgeries scheduled for its first day of operation, should reach 60 percent capacity within its first week and 80 percent capacity within the first two months that it’s open.

“It’s a little bit scary, or exciting, depending upon your point of view,” he said.