NICU Patient Outcomes – Parkland Hospital

Susan Puumala (HDR)

Opened in August of 2015, the new Parkland Hospital is a 2.8 million square-foot, public safety net hospital owned and operated by the Dallas County Hospital District. Parkland serves the highest need, ethnically diverse, underserved, unfunded, or underfunded residents of Dallas County, Texas. It is also Dallas County’s primary provider of healthcare to the Medicaid population. The NICU at Parkland underwent a dramatic change in design, moving from an open bay to single family rooms. This study aims to provide insights about the effects of design decisions in the NICU on patient outcomes. Analysis of hospital-collected neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) patient data, we investigated differences in length of stay, feeding outcomes, growth trajectory, and adverse events between the old open-bay NICU design as compared to the private family rooms with the decentralized/hybrid nursing model in the new hospital. Parkland provided a limited dataset of encounter-level medical records for patients admitted to the NICU between 2013 and 2017, a total of 9,995 neonatal encounters were examined. The dataset allowed for controlled statistical analyses using comparative pre- and post-intervention independent samples as well asinvestigation of trend over time to detect differences in outcomes between the time periods.