By Steve Kaskovich
DALLAS – Dec. 09, 2024 – When William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital (CUH) opened on Dec. 6, 2014, it established a new level of care in North Texas, where patients could receive the most advanced treatments for both common and complex conditions in a truly healing environment.
It also launched a decade of clinical transformation at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
In its first 10 years, the iconic W-shaped hospital and its dedicated faculty and staff have more than delivered on the UTSW promise of excellence and innovation. CUH has been ranked the No. 1 hospital in Dallas-Fort Worth by U.S. News & World Report for eight consecutive years. It has regularly earned top national recognition for patient experience and satisfaction from Press Ganey. And it has sparked a building boom at UTSW that brought the addition of a third 12-story tower at CUH, a second radiation oncology building, a cancer outpatient building, and regional medical centers in Frisco, Fort Worth, Las Colinas, Coppell, and at RedBird in southern Dallas County – all to serve more patients and meet the needs of the community.
As a result, UT Southwestern has broadened its reach in the Metroplex. Since 2015, annual inpatient admissions have increased by nearly 44%, emergency department visits are up 43%, and the volume of procedures and surgeries performed has grown by more than 135%. Solid organ transplants have more than doubled from 212 in fiscal year 2015 to 502 in fiscal year 2024.
Long known as a national leader in biomedical research, UT Southwestern is now recognized as one of the country’s top hospitals, thanks to the success of CUH and the dedicated teams that work there.
“I am incredibly proud of what our staff and faculty have accomplished over these 10 years, taking a new state-of-the-art facility and really making that a springboard for the level of care any of us would want for our families or ourselves,” said Daniel K. Podolsky, M.D., President of UT Southwestern. “CUH has, in a sense, catalyzed how we provide care, working as teams, bringing multiple disciplines together, for the benefit of our patients.”
Elevating the patient experience
UT Southwestern leaders were committed to creating a flagship hospital that was patient-centric, with quality, safety, and efficiency as top priorities, when they set out to build the 12-story, 460-bed hospital to replace the aging St. Paul University Hospital, which opened in 1963.
To that end, the planning process for CUH centered around listening to physicians, nurses, and other clinicians, as well as patients and members of the Dallas community, to learn what they desired in a new hospital. Ultimately, its design had three overarching goals – focus on what is best for the patient, promote innovation, and integrate UT Southwestern’s research, educational, and patient care missions.
What resulted was a hospital with many features that have contributed to an enhanced patient experience:
Rooms are built with large windows to allow for abundant natural light, which has been shown to improve healing, and with enough space to comfortably accommodate guests and caregivers.
Bold and alluring artwork greets patients and visitors, from large mobiles hanging in the lobby to prints adorning the walls of clinics and patient rooms, promoting a sense of calm and healing.
The design ensures that patients can control the lighting, temperature, and window shades in their rooms – and even order meals – all from a remote at their bedside.
Flat-screen monitors with videoconferencing capability in patient rooms allow physicians to consult with colleagues or display medical images – such as X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs – to better explain an illness.
Patients can also use the screens to teleconference with family and friends.
“The design of the space and the building itself does provide the backdrop by which you can really focus on what’s important, which is to deliver the best care for the patient,” said Jonathan Efron, M.D., Executive Vice President for Health System Affairs.
Behind the scenes, the building’s design reduces the distance that caregivers must travel to reach patients so team members can more easily and quickly communicate. Nursing stations are located between rooms, so nurses stay closer to patients.
“It’s bright, it’s clean, and there are places for the staff to go outside and eat their lunch and keep their energy up,” said Susan Hernandez, D.N.P., M.B.A., RN, Vice President and Health System Chief Nurse Executive. “Nurses feel better about their work when they can go about it more efficiently.”
The third 12-story tower opened in December 2020, boosting the hospital’s total bed count to more than 750 and adding interventional suites, more operating rooms, a bigger emergency department, and two parking facilities.
The timing could not have been better, coming in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only did it give UT Southwestern more capacity to manage the public health emergency, but the layout of CUH also offered the flexibility to move walls and expand the number of negative-pressure rooms needed to give the best possible care to patients infected with the virus.
In its first year of operation, CUH was identified as a Top Performer by The Joint Commission, the nation’s oldest and largest standards-setting and accrediting body in health care. The designation recognized accredited hospitals that achieve a score of 95% or above on numerous safety and quality accountability measures. In subsequent years, CUH has been recognized nationally for high levels of patient satisfaction, patient safety, and quality of care from multiple reviewing bodies, such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Leapfrog, Healthgrades, and Press Ganey.
“When we opened the building, we also enhanced what was already a good culture in terms of what we expect of each other. We pushed each other for further excellence,” Dr. Hernandez said. “CUH has helped us to reach new heights.”
The future of medicine
In addition to its patient-friendly features, CUH was built to take advantage of new technologies.
For example, in the hospital’s epilepsy monitoring unit (EMU), specialty lifts are installed to allow caregivers to help patients move about while their brain activity is being monitored around the clock. The hospital has invested in quality improvement technology in its operating rooms that records every aspect of a surgery to help teams continuously learn and improve safety and efficiency. And it’s not uncommon to see one of four Moxi robots traversing the corridors of CUH, delivering telemetry boxes or performing other tasks so nurses and patient care technicians can spend more time with their patients.
“We’re in an age of medicine where we’re not really sure what the next innovation is going to be,” Dr. Efron said. “But we’ve established an infrastructure at CUH that will allow us to incorporate any advances, whether in artificial intelligence or gene therapy, into the facility.”
The ability to care for more patients with complex conditions at CUH has enabled the UT Southwestern Health System to expand to serve the rapidly growing Dallas-Fort Worth population. Since CUH opened, clinical space at UTSW has more than doubled and UTSW has expanded its presence across North Texas, including through partnerships with Texas Health Resources and Children’s Health.
“CUH is really the heart and the hub for how we have grown the health system,” Dr. Efron said. “All of that growth was feasible because we had a large hospital that provides the highest level of care and support for patients who were initially seen in ambulatory clinics across the Metroplex – from Frisco to Fort Worth, Plano to RedBird.”
Looking ahead, Dr. Efron sees the need for an expansion of ambulatory clinics and surgery centers across the region to serve the needs of growing communities. With the addition of other hospital facilities in Dallas’ Southwestern Medical District, including the new Parkland Memorial Hospital that opened just a year after CUH, a state behavioral health hospital scheduled to open in 2025, and the new $5 billion joint pediatric campus under construction directly across Harry Hines Boulevard from CUH, UT Southwestern is positioned to be a leader in clinical care, research, and education for decades to come.
While he was impressed with the patient-centric design of CUH when he arrived at UTSW in 2023, Dr. Efron said it has been the teamwork and care of UT Southwestern’s physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses, and vital support staff that have made CUH so successful throughout its first 10 years.
“When I got here, what complemented the design and the aesthetic of Clements were the people and their dedication to caring for the patient and each other,” he said. “You can have the most amazing building, but if you don’t have the right people and the right processes, it’s not going to work well. I really feel that we have an amazing group of individuals who work in the facility and put the patient first.”
Dr. Podolsky holds the Charles Cameron Sprague Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science and the Philip O’Bryan Montgomery, Jr., M.D. Distinguished Presidential Chair in Academic Administration.
A decade of Health System expansion
The opening of Clements University Hospital launched a clinical expansion at UT Southwestern over the past 10 years.
2017
UT Southwestern opens the Monty and Tex Moncrief Medical Center at Fort Worth, a three-story, 110,000-square-foot multispecialty outpatient facility offering patient care in 16 specialties.
2018
West Campus Building 3, a 305,000-square-foot clinical and academic building, opens, bringing clinics and academic offices for several departments under one roof.
2019
UT Southwestern Medical Center at Frisco, offering specialty care for adults and children in a dozen specialty areas, opens on a 20-acre campus in conjunction with Texas Health Hospital Frisco, a first-of-its-kind collaboration with Texas Health Resources.
2020
A 12-story third tower opens at Clements University Hospital with an expanded emergency department and additional patient rooms, bringing the hospital’s bed count to about 750.
2021
A 71,000-square-foot addition to radiation oncology services opens, nearly doubling the department’s space by adding a second building with 49 exam rooms, procedure rooms, and patient support rooms and more than a dozen advanced imaging/treatment machines.
2022
UT Southwestern Medical Center at RedBird opens, bringing primary care, cardiology, cancer care, and culinary medicine to residents in southern Dallas.
A nine-story, 300,000-square-foot Cancer Care Outpatient Building opens, more than doubling the amount of treatment space.
The Texas Health and Human Services Commission, UT Southwestern, and Children’s Health host a groundbreaking ceremony to celebrate the start of construction on the state’s newest psychiatric hospital in Dallas. The Texas Behavioral Health Center at UT Southwestern is scheduled to open in late 2025.
2023
UT Southwestern Medical Center at Coppell opens, offering primary care services for patients in the northwest Dallas area.
2024
UT Southwestern and Children’s Health break ground on a $5 billion pediatric health campus to replace the existing Children’s Medical Center Dallas. The campus will be located across Harry Hines Boulevard from Clements University Hospital.
UT Southwestern announces plans to expand cancer services in the Fort Worth Medical District with construction of a two-story Radiation Oncology campus that will house the city’s first MRI-guided precision radiation treatment.
UT Southwestern completes renovations to 10 operating rooms at Zale Lipshy Pavilion, which will open for surgeries in January 2025.
About UT Southwestern Medical Center
UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,200 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 120,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5 million outpatient visits a year.