Florida Hospital Orlando expands cardiac ICU
Florida Hospital Orlando on Monday unveiled an expansion to its cardiac intensive care unit, adding eight beds designated for patients who have severe heart and lung failure and need to be on a lifesaving machine called ECMO.
Using ECMO is expensive and requires specially trained providers and more staff. Nine hospitals in Florida offer ECMO for adults and children, according to the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization. All three children’s hospitals in Orlando offer ECMO, but Florida Hospital is the only medical center to offer the therapy for adults. And with the area’s population growth, the hospital was running at or above capacity.
“We had a situation where we had to say no,” said Dr. Robert Duane Davis, the chief medical officer of several institutes at Florida Hospital, including the Cardiovascular Institute. “We
had a limited capacity. We were full most of the time. And when the unit is full, you can’t really do bunk beds. So really, it’s about saying yes when we need to say yes.”
ECMO, which stands for Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation, is used for patients who have life-threatening illnesses that stop the heart or lungs from working properly, according to the American Thoracic Society.
“It puts oxygen in the bloodstream and takes carbon dioxide out of it,” Davis said.
The Bush Family Advanced Cardiac Surgical Unit is an $8 million investment, more than $1 million of which came from fundraisers and donations.
The unit is an extension of the hospital’s 34-bed surgical cardiac intensive care unit and will expand its capacity to care for 200 to 300 additional ECMO patients each year.
The new rooms are 40 percent larger than the hospital’s existing cardiac intensive care units, said Mary Nelson, a nurse and ECMO program manager at Florida Hospital.
“They accommodate the extra machine and the high level of life support and allow for families to stay in the room with the patients,” Nelson said. “The rooms also have all the latest technology, including ceiling lifts in every room to make sure we’re really able to get these patients up and moving and turning to reduce any complications that they might have.”
Patients on ECMO stay for as long as three months in the hospital.
Studies have shown clear benefits for using ECMO in children, but the benefits have been less clear for adults. Nevertheless, the use of ECMO has increased by 400 percent between 2006 and 2011, according to a 2016 study in the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine. Close to 14,000 adults received ECMO between 1990 and 2014; between 40 percent and 60 percent of them survived their life-threatening condition and were discharged from the hospital.
“ECMO is a short-term support, and it will continue to get better from that standpoint, and they’ll be able to use it longer,” Davis said. He added that with advancements in technology, potentially a wider range of ailments can benefit from ECMO.
“But you don’t go home with ECMO,” he said. “It’s a bridge to something, either to recovering, meaning that the body organ recovers enough, or it’s a bridge to some sort of device down the road.”
Patients will be transferred to the new beds today.