On Friday July 23, 2021, Ozark Radio News was granted a tour on the new Ozark Healthcare expansion. The planning stages of the expansion began in 2015 and as the community sees the fruits of their labor, the hospital hopes to bring a new age of healthcare, technology, and comfort to their patients and the Ozarks.
Cromwell Architects Engineers in Little Rock, Arkansas designed the OZH expansion. Cromwell is known for other building designs such as the OrthoArkansas building and the Arkansas Children’s Hospital South Wing, both of which are in Little Rock.
The new medical office building has a long concourse in the front to help inspire the connection from visiting your doctor for a check-up to labs to surgical areas. The offices that patience will visit will be on the second and third floors with a flexible room plan. This plan will allow the visitation rooms to be used by other physicians when a doctor is in surgery allowing maximum use for the rooms. Along the north side of the building will be the personal offices of the doctors and surgeons of OZH. A hallway will connect the offices along the north side to the original OZH building.
The new in-building testing laboratory is equipped with vacuum tubes that will allow samples and results to travel across the facility at record speeds. New Imaging Suite will be housed in the complex. The suite will be installing new X-ray, MRI, and other imaging machines. Having an Imaging Suite in the same building will help shorted the time that scans will take to travel from X-ray techs to doctors and nurses.
The hospital is also getting a new cafeteria area for the first time in over two decades. The new eatery will be more open, with more tables and food options. The goal in the cafeteria changes was to allow visitors and patients to have a restaurant-like experience.
Personally, I found the atrium to be awe-inspiring. The three story building has a great view of the area and is not impeded upon by other nearby buildings. The design of the patient and visitor areas are more open than the original building or the former Shaw building. The concourse has incorporated light-sensitive lighting that will allow a constant level of light from natural sunshine during the day to energy-saving LED light in the evening. The new hospital offers the feeling of technology and innovation that one would expect to find in a city ten times the size while offering the personal experience that we in south central Missouri have come to expect.
