At the building site, Larry Altier is happy to provide tours of the 200,000-square-foot building in Ft. Myers that will soon be his home base. 

“This will be a 41 degree room,” he says.  “Actually even our dock is refrigerated so that product once prepared it’s refrigerated and it never leaves(the refrigeration) until it get passed onto the customer.”

Altier is assistant director of Food and Nutrition services for the Lee Memorial Health System, which cooks and serves about 4 million meals a year. He uses that  most basic of foods, the adaptable onion, to explain the advantages of doing most of the prep work for those meals at the new “cook and chill”  facility.  

“I can trim, clean and cut all those onions for the same seven locations.  I save three hours of productive time that would otherwise have to be used at the sites in order to just make onions,” he says.

Altier  says dollars spent on food prep can now go to patient care instead.

Work on the $47 million complex began last April. And it’s an investment in much more than food prep.  It also marks another phase in relationship between the Lee Memorial Health System and the Sarasota Memorial Health Care System – together known as LeeSar.  The two not-for-for profit hospitals have joined forces to maximize their purchasing power.  Now the purchasing will also be done out of this new facility in Ft. Myers known as the LeeSar Complex.  Bob Simpson is LeeSar’s CEO.

“So we’ve come together with a coalition where we can take the buying power of the group and drive the best value,” he said. “That’s what this center is all about.”

Purchasing for two other not-for-profit hospitals will also be done from the LeeSar Complex.  One is in Central Florida the other in Alabama.  Suppliers will ship the products to Ft. Myers and from there they will be forwarded to the hospitals.    Simpson says this approach is unique within the healthcare industry. But, Lee Memorial Health Systems CEO Jim Nathan said they’ve launched a trend he expects others to follow.

“I think over time even in markets there’s competition between the various systems. They’re going to have to figure out how to come together in some way to provide these behind the scenes shared services because the dollars are simply not going to be there to duplicate in every single hospital,” says Nathan.

He is referring cuts to Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, which will have a significant impact in the retiree-rich sunbelt.

There are no hospitals in Lee County operating outside the Lee Memorial Health System, making it the fifth largest public hospital system in the country. Nathan said by further extending its purchasing power, and by centralizing some services within the system,  patients benefit.

“Our primary business is health care and the more that we can automate or find other mechanisms that reduce the support systems costs (is good) because there’s nobody yet that can show us how you automate direct patient care,” he says.

In another move to point more resources towards patient care, the LeeSar facility will house a state of the art sterilization center. Overseeing this is Denise Anderson, a former operating room nurse and director of surgery for Lee Memorial.  Passing a row of shining autoclaves that look like oversized washing machines, she said it’s likely the largest facility of its kind. 

“The dirty instruments come in from the other side and go through what we call our decontamination area which the washers are on the other side,” she says. “And, this is actually the quarantine area where they cool.”

All the surgical instruments for Lee Memorial’s four hospitals will travel through here. Cleaned instruments will be returned to hospitals on sterile trays as requested for procedures. Anderson said once it’s up and running the 48,000-square-foot sterilization area will save time and money.

“By centralizing it and standardizing the equipment that we use in the four hospitals it saves us a huge amount of money and capitol expenditures or not spending capitol money to buy to more instruments,” she said. “So the fact that we can share them amongst the four hospitals creates a lot of the cost savings.”

That’s more cost savings that can be directed to patient care. Centralized services are expected to begin operating out of the LeeSar Center sometime this fall.