Delivering continued world-class medical care in state-of-the-art Verstandig Pavilion
The new Verstandig Pavilion at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital will accelerate the region’s healthcare capabilities and allow MedStar Health to remain on the forefront of healthcare delivery.
By WP Creative Group
May 1, 2024
In December 2023, Medstar Georgetown University Hospital cut the ribbon on the new Verstandig Pavilion, a 477,000-square-foot medical and surgical building.
The pavilion includes a new emergency department with 32 private rooms, as well as 31 state-of-the-art operating rooms, 156 private patient rooms and more. Patients have trusted MedStar Georgetown with their care for more than 100 years, and this new addition ensures MedStar Georgetown will continue to deliver world-class healthcare.
Neurosurgeon Chris Kalhorn, M.D., director of Medstar Georgetown’s epilepsy, pediatric and functional Neurosurgery Program, called the Verstandig Pavilion “a game changer.”
“The pavilion offers a number of very high-level technological advancements, especially in the operating rooms,” Kalhorn said. “This space is the physical manifestation of the high-quality care that we deliver every single day and it’ll help us continue to do so.”
One of the most transformative elements of the Verstandig Pavilion is the new, modern emergency department (ER). This ER features 32 individual exam rooms, which give Kerri Layman, chief of emergency medicine at MedStar Georgetown, and her colleagues better access to the technological equipment and medical supplies needed to deliver lifesaving care.
The Verstandig Pavilion also has 156 spacious private patient rooms, awash with natural light to support healing.
“When you’re having an emergency, you’re already overstimulated,” Layman explained. “When a patient is able to go into a quiet, private room, that calms them down quite a bit. You’re not seeing as much of what’s going on with other patients, or the general hustle and bustle of an emergency department.”
Opened in December 2023, the Verstandig Pavilion utilizes the latest technological innovations to continue providing world-class healthcare. Photo credit: Silver Ridge Productions
Time is crucial in an emergency. That’s why the Verstandig Pavilion features a rooftop helipad with direct access to the ER and operating rooms, and dedicated entry points for ambulance drop-offs and walk-ins for easy entry and triage. When families come to visit their loved ones they’ll find plenty of parking on one of the pavilion’s three levels of underground parking.
“The accessibility of the new ER is great,” said Layman. “You can drive in and park in a garage. You can drive in and drop off your loved one. You can come in through an ambulance in a separate entrance through the back of the emergency department.”
Once they’ve arrived at the pavilion, patients will find that each emergency medicine physician at MedStar Georgetown is specialty-trained and board-certified or board-eligible, and the ER is equipped to care for a range of illnesses or injuries, from broken bones to strokes.
The new Verstandig Pavilion offers enough capacity for all surgeries performed by MedStar Georgetown physicians, including an entire floor dedicated to neurosurgery, as well as the area’s only hospital floor designed solely for patients recovering from kidney, liver, small bowel, pancreas and multi-organ transplants.
Patrick Jackson, M.D., the division chief of general surgery at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, calls the technology available in the Verstandig Pavilion’s 31 operating rooms “futuristic.”
“The technological advances in our operating rooms are dramatic,” said Jackson. “The way we’ve integrated state-of-the-art cameras and display screens into one system has made my job so much easier.”
“The way we’ve integrated state-of-the-art cameras and display screens into one system has made my job so much easier.”
– Patrick Jackson, M.D., division chief of general surgery at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital
The system, called a CollaboratOR, allows doctors to integrate all of a patient’s information – previous CT scans, a note from a physician and 4K visuals on the current operation – into one platform. The CollaboratOR’s main interface is a touch screen that works a lot like the screen of a cell phone and is large enough to be viewed anywhere in the operating room.
“There’s a lot of different data points involved in taking care of just one patient,” he said. “Every time I operate on a gallbladder, for instance, I shoot an X-ray to make sure all of the tubes that connect to the gallbladder are fine and that we’ve removed all the stones. Now, on the screen, I can integrate the laparoscopic image that I’m using with the little camera and the X-ray image, and overlay them right next to each other.”
Additionally, each of the pavilion’s 31 operating rooms is equipped with a surgical in-light camera. These cameras are equipped with spectral imaging technology, enhancing a surgeon’s precision by identifying critical anatomy, blood flow and cancer margins not visible to the naked eye. Using the CollaboratOR, surgeons can also transmit images from that camera to another operating room anywhere in the world.
“This space is the physical manifestation of the high-quality care that we deliver every single day and it’ll help us continue to do so.”
– Chris Kalhorn, M.D., director of Medstar Georgetown’s epilepsy, pediatric and functional Neurosurgery Program
Perhaps one of the most innovative pieces of medical technology in the Verstandig Pavilion is the Intraoperative MRI system (IMRIS), the first of its kind in the region, providing real-time imaging without transferring surgery patients outside the operating room so neurosurgeons can precisely remove brain tumors, accurately place electrodes during deep brain stimulation surgeries, minimize risk and reduce the need for post-op imaging and additional surgeries.
“Before IMRIS, we would bring the patient to the recovery room after completing an operation. Normally, that day or the following day, we’d perform a postoperative MRI of the brain to confirm that we’ve achieved our surgical goal in terms of maximum safe resection of the tumor,” Kalhorn explained. “What the IMRI suite allows us to do is to perform in real time an MRI of the patient in the operating room before we even close or complete the procedure. Before the patient ever leaves the OR we’re able to verify that we’ve achieved our neurosurgical goal.”
Kalhorn says this technology is particularly helpful when performing deep brain stimulation surgery for patients with movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease — a procedure typically performed while the patient is awake so doctors can test the stimulation and ensure patients aren’t having any side effects.
“It can be very difficult for our patients to undergo that procedure awake,” said Kalhorn. “They have to be off of their Parkinson’s medication, so that creates a lot of motor symptoms for the patient. But with this intraoperative MRI suite, we are able to perform the entire operation, if we decide to do it that way, with a patient under general anesthesia. So they’re completely asleep and can be on their Parkinson’s medication.”
Although the Verstandig Pavilion has only been open for a few months, it is already transforming the way doctors at MedStar Health deliver personalized care, deploy new technologies and meet the needs of families across the region and beyond.
“Our goal was to take into account what our current needs are at MedStar Georgetown, but also to look to the future of neurosurgical care,” Kalhorn said. “We’re never content with the status quo at MedStar. We want to be on the cutting edge.”
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