Florida's First Orthopedic Hospital

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It’s the first stand-alone orthopedic hospital in the southeastern United States. And when the Orlando Health Jewett Orthopedic Institute opened in August, it marked the beginning of a new era of orthopedic care in Florida.

“We decided that we really needed to build a facility that could meet the needs of Central Florida and beyond,” says April Ernst, chief operating officer for the institute. “With the booming population, along with that comes orthopedic care needs."

The seven-story, 375,000-sq.-ft. hospital is located on Orlando Health’s downtown campus. It’s equipped with everything from sports simulators for athletes to an auditorium where observers can watch surgeries to a “bioskills” lab where residents can train and practice on human cadavers.

The $300-million project will create up to 400 new health care jobs, according to Orlando Health. The institute offers the full range of orthopedic services, from knee and hip replacements to spinal surgeries and treatment of sportsrelated injuries.

“You can provide excellent specialized care when you focus on just one thing and one thing alone,” Ernst says. “Our teams are solely focused on orthopedics. When that’s all that you do — and you do it over and over and over again — you’re able to provide a service that’s high-quality.”

The project's first phase, which opened in March, includes a six-story medical office pavilion with 12 operating rooms and a clinic with 62 exam rooms. It’s also equipped with ultrafast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with augmented reality.

The second phase, which opened in August, includes the seven-story orthopedic hospital with 10 additional operating rooms, 75 “smart” hospital rooms and the 10-station bioskills lab.   

Key Components

• Educational showroom: In the hospital’s lobby, a replica of an operating room displays equipment and implants that are commonly used in orthopedic surgeries. Interactive exhibits can walk patients through the procedure they will undergo.
• Sports simulators: The hospital will treat a lot of sports injuries, as it has partnerships with nearly 40 sports teams at the high school, college and professional level across Central Florida. Its sports simulators serve as physical therapy tools. They started as golf simulators but have since been programmed for other sports, including soccer and tennis.
• Training auditorium: The hospital’s seventh-floor auditorium hosts lectures and presentations for up to 116 people. Instead of just a handful of observers watching a procedure in an operating room, scores of students, staffers and medical residents are able to watch surgeries live from the auditorium.
• Bioskills lab: Also on the seventh floor is a bioskills lab where the hospital’s 25 orthopedic residents can practice their techniques on cadavers, medical simulators or synthetic models.

Tags: Healthcare, Feature