Corewell Health West is the West Michigan region of Corewell Health, a Michigan-based nonprofit health system with hospitals, outpatient sites and medical education programs across the state. Its Grand Rapids facilities include Butterworth Hospital and Blodgett Hospital, alongside specialty and community-based services.
Butterworth Hospital is planning a major new tower. What challenges and opportunities is this investment designed to address?
We know that our Grand Rapids hospital operates above 90% capacity, and our community is growing. In our five-year projection, there is 2.4% growth in Kent County. The above-65 age group is going to be the largest growing population, and with that comes increased health needs.
Our emergency department is designed to see about 70,000 patients a year, and we see over 100,000. That unfortunately results in hallway care, boarding, and suboptimal conditions to provide state-of-the-art emergency care. Looking at the facility we are going to need in the next five years to care for our community is paramount.
The proposed expansion has been described as an opportunity to modernize care. What does that mean in practice, particularly in surgical care?
I’ll give the example of our operating rooms. We are proposing about 12 to 14 new operating rooms at Butterworth, and trying to right-size those for the care delivered. With robotic surgery, the square footage needs of a typical operating room has increased quite a bit. To maintain sterile fields and flow for staff, it requires a different design than the operating room of old.
For one type of robot, surgeons sit at a console away from the patient, and about six to eight arms go into the patient that they control from the console. It allows more precision, takes little tremors out of the equation, and allows movements that cannot be done with typical laparoscopic or conventional surgery. We see a reduction in post-operative pain, overall length of stay, and improved outcomes. We are also proposing all private rooms; Butterworth currently has about 100 semi-private rooms, and with privacy concerns and infection control, semi-private rooms are kind of a relic of the past.
Butterworth is a major regional referral center for trauma, cardiovascular care, transplantation and neuroscience. Are patients arriving with more complex needs today?
Certainly. We had a patient who was post-lung transplant at Butterworth Hospital and, on his way home from a follow-up appointment, was in a major car accident. He came in as a level one trauma with multiple injuries. The teams saved this gentleman’s life twice: once with a lung transplant and once as a level one trauma.
I think we are identifying new complexities within healthcare and new technologies we can apply to diseases that we could not before. You think of gene cell therapy for some conditions that were incurable in the past, where now we have a cure. Offering that complex level of care at Butterworth is something we want to provide to keep care local. It also requires collaboration, such as our Wednesday heart team meeting, where cardiothoracic surgeons, cardiologists and cardiac anesthesiologists decide whether bypass, a catheter-based procedure or conservative therapy is best.
Where is AI making the biggest practical difference inside Corewell Health’s operations today?
Realistically, we are seeing it with ambient listening technology reducing documentation burden for clinicians. We started with physicians and APPs in office-based appointments, where it listens to the interaction and generates a clinical note. We have seen a significant reduction in the time physicians spend after hours charting from home. It has been a game changer from an efficiency standpoint.
We are trying to expand that into the nursing workforce. We also see AI in radiology, assisting physicians in image reading and triaging higher-acuity findings, such as large vessel occlusions in stroke care, so those studies get pushed to clinical teams that can save patient lives.
What are the biggest challenges facing hospitals today, and how do you decide where investment matters most?
We are going to have an aging population with a declining workforce. That makes retaining and recruiting top-level talent critical, but we also have to transform how we work. One example is a new role called the hospitality tech, which combines nutrition aid, environmental services and some tech responsibilities. It offloads tasks traditionally given to nurses, so they can practice at the top of license.
When it comes to investment, you have to be very discerning and a little bit clairvoyant looking into the future. Parking for the new medical center is one example, as we plan for Uber, self-driving vehicles and autonomous vehicles. More broadly, keeping as much care local as possible is something we pride ourselves on, including expanding services at rural hospitals so patients do not have to drive to Grand Rapids.
How does Priority Health differentiate Corewell Health, and where do you see healthcare making the most meaningful progress?
We really think we are a differentiated health system because of Priority Health. It is our insurance arm and covers 1.3 million lives across Michigan and a little bit in neighboring states, across Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, commercial and individual platforms. What differentiates us is our drive to value: trying to innovate to lower the cost of care for patients and business owners with insurance premiums.
One example is our value-based clinics, where advanced primary care physicians have lower panels — instead of 1,500 patients, they have 600 — and we embed pharmacists, psychologists and community health workers for patients with complex disease states. Another example is developing more ambulatory surgical centers that are non-hospital outpatient departments, when appropriate, to lower the total cost of care. Looking across healthcare, the innovation is astounding, and the precision of therapies is only going to accelerate. With more data about patients and the effectiveness of therapies, we will be able to tailor care to the individual patient.
