A Hospital without Walls

At Virginia Hospital Center, treating disease doesn't require a patient-or a room.

When Cathy Turner looked at the blood sugar readings she had just taken, she was shocked. It read over 400, four times the average fasting level. She told the woman, an employee of an Arlington Virginia business she was visiting, that the test results called for a trip to her doctor.

The reading could indicate undiagnosed Diabetes, which if untreated could cause a host of medical problems, from blindness to nerve damage and more. The surprised woman said Diabetes ran in her family, but she hadn't even thought about getting tested until the medical team came to her office. The incident, which happened in August 2008, was only one of the many times Turner's group of traveling medical technicians identified possible health problems of employees in Arlington Virginia and elsewhere. Turner, the director of Health Promotions for the Arlington-based Virginia Hospital Center, launched the health outreach program 15 years ago as a way for the non-profit hospital to better serve the community. "My job is to keep people out of here!," Turner said. "Everything I do is focused on outside of this hospital." In an average year, Virginia Hospital Center reaches out to 150 companies in the region, with fall being the busiest tine of year. The program, called Healthworks, is designed to uncover possible problems that Turner's team can identify and send the company's employee to see a doctor or specialist. "Our goal is to help them make lifestyle changes so they don't develop some of these diseases," she said.

No walls, no patients

Our idea of what a hospital does is usually framed by our own personal experiences. It's a place to go when we or our loved ones are injured or sick. Doctors and nurses assess our condition and administer treatment. In the best outcomes, we get better, get discharged and go home. But increasingly, hospitals are more than a building with beds and equipment, or a place to hold exercise classes or wellness lectures. They have become front line fighters against disease, measuring community health even if their subjects never walk through the hospital's front door. With new portable diagnostic tools hospitals such as the one in Arlington can go beyond their borders to actually gauge the health of the surrounding population.