 |
A gathering area for family and siblings of patients in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. |
Lighting in the large, operating suites is tinted green to allow surgeons a better view of computerized monitors.
A state-of-the-art scanner captures images of a full body trauma in 10 seconds.
A rooftop garden, complete with a small pond, offers families an escape from the medical world.
And, inside the emergency room, sits Oxy, a security dog who also delves in patient relations.
 |
The Rooftop Garden will allow families to escape the medical world. |
“The Hixson-Lied Center for Clinical Excellence is a milestone three years in the making,” said Glenn Fosdick, president and CEO of The Nebraska Medical Center, and “combines the strengths of private and academic medicine.”
“Today represents another step into making the medical center a world-class teaching and clinical institution,” said UNMC Chancellor Harold M. Maurer, M.D. “The care patients receive is not only recognized locally and regionally, but nationally and internationally as well, because of the strength of the partnership between the hospital and UNMC.”
 |
Dmitry Oleynikov, M.D., talks about the da Vinci robotic system in one of the new operating room suites. |
The $56.5 million Hixson-Lied Center for Clinical Excellence is home to the largest emergency department between Chicago and Denver, more than 25 state-of-the-art operating rooms, radiology equipment that can scan an image of a beating heart in just five heartbeats and a Newborn Intensive Care Unit designed around the tiniest patients.
The 165,000-square-foot building is named for the Lied Foundation Trust and its sole trustee, Christina M. Hixson, in honor of a $10 million donation. Private donors paid for all but about 4 percent of the construction costs, Fosdick said. The rest will come from the hospital’s operating revenue.
 |
One of the new Neonatal Intensive Care Unit suites. |
The radiology department, spread across two floors, also will streamline the patient experience by offering most of its services in one place. The operating rooms, the first of which will open in January, will be larger and each will be outfitted with the OR-1 technology and the equipment needed to do minimally invasive procedures or large open surgeries like organ transplantation.
Sitting atop the Hixson-Lied Center for Clinical Excellence is a place made just for premature infants and sick newborns. The Newborn Intensive Care Unit, which plans to open to families on Nov. 16, features 34 private suites and is the only unit in the region designated as Level IIIC that provides ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation).
“See how one milestone is destined to become many miracles,” Lewis Trowbridge, chairman of The Nebraska Medical Center Board of Directors, said at Friday’s dedication of the new Hixson-Lied Center for Clinical Excellence.
 |
One of the new trauma bays inside the new emergency department. |
- 900,000 screws
- 750 gallons of paint
- 2,928 light fixtures, 750 light switches and 2,446 electrical plugs – enough to furnish 85 homes
- 20,312 sheets of drywall, which if laid flat and stacked would be 300-feet taller than the First National Tower
- 2,200,000 pounds of structural steel – which is about the weight of 550 elephants
- 1,800,000 pounds of reinforcing steel – if laid end to end could reach Kansas City
- 6,995 cubic yards of concrete, which could pave a six-foot wide sidewalk around Lake Zorinsky five times
- 1,992,950 linear feet of copper electrical wire, which at 377 miles could run all the way to Minneapolis
- 395,000 pounds of mechanical piping, which is equal to the weight of 60 Chevy Suburbans