As the Arkansas Heart Hospital of Little Rock builds its $77 million hospital in Bryant, it also is working to keep patients out of the hospital.
In August, the Arkansas Heart Hospital Foundation started a pilot program to teach students at Morrilton Intermediate School about nutrition, said Arkansas Heart’s CEO, Dr. Bruce Murphy. “So we’re really interested in trying to reach back into the pediatric stage, where maybe we can make a lifelong difference in a patient’s behavior,” he said.
The program hopes to combat Arkansas’ rising obesity rates, a phenomenon seen across the country, he said.
“When I started the practice of medicine almost 40 years ago … almost nobody that was obese,” Murphy said. “And now, 40 years later, 40 percent of adult Arkansans are.” And, he said, there are no signs that percentage will decline.
Murphy is looking to make the program available to any school district in Arkansas. “Hopefully these fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders don’t grow up to be as big as Mom and Dad,” Murphy said.
In addition, about two years ago, the hospital started StrongHearts, an intensive cardiac rehabilitation program, at its main Little Rock hospital. It was expanded to Russellville in March and will be offered at the new Bryant hospital, scheduled to open in mid-2020.
The program is intended for patients with major cardiac problems and features 72 sessions, half on physical activity and the other half on educating patients on nutrition and stress reduction.
Murphy said the Heart Hospital is conducting 3,000-4,000 sessions a month. The sessions are “stronger than any medicine we can give them,” he said.
Arkansas Heart plans to have eight to 10 rehabilitation sites in Arkansas, but Murphy didn’t have a timetable for when then next one would be announced.
In the meantime, it’s growing its bariatric surgery program. “Now we have two bariatric surgeons and we probably need four of five,” Murphy said.
In the next year, the hospital is on track to do about 500 surgeries, but there are 750,000 obese adults in Arkansas, he said. “You can see that the number of potential patients needing this service is staggering,” Murphy said.
In 2017, the Heart Hospital began offering weight-loss surgery as a way to fight heart disease and rising obesity rates. Its Bariatric & Metabolic Institute was a hit with patients because of its 85 percent success rate in curing people with Type 2 diabetes, the most common kind, he said. “The patients come in on multiple medications for diabetes, get the surgery and they’re sent home on nothing for diabetes,” Murphy said.
Arkansas Heart also has seen its revenue climb. For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2017, it had revenue of $184 million, up 22 percent from the previous year. It had a net income of $12 million for its fiscal year that ended in 2017 compared with a net loss of $3.8 million the previous year.
The need for more bariatric operations was one of Arkansas Heart Hospital’s motivations in building a new hospital. That service “has congested our operating rooms and congested our campus,” Murphy said. “And so we looked for ways to remedy that.”
The hospital chose a site off Highway 5 in Bryant to build a four-story 95,485-SF hospital. Plans also call for a two-story, 28,000-SF medical office building. Known as Arkansas Heart Hospital Encore, the building also will include a full-service emergency department.
The construction cost for the 25-bed hospital will be $57 million, making it the seventh-largest commercial project under construction in Arkansas. The equipment to furnish the building will cost about $20 million.
Clark Contractors LLC of Little Rock is the contractor, and the architect is WD&D Architects of Little Rock.
The new hospital will have about 250 full-time employees.
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