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by Lisa Fields
The idyll of a quiet Saturday at home shatters when the phone rings. It's your teenage son, talking fast through pain and panic. He took a nasty spill while skateboarding at the park down the street from your house. His leg is broken.
You rush to get him to the hospital, but the highway is more parking lot than roadway. The 30-minute drive to your closest hospital is agony for both of you.
If you're a resident of Stafford County, Virginia, the above example can often be a reality. The simple convenience of quickly getting to the nearest hospital, Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, isn't always possible because of traffic tie-ups.
A new hospital in Stafford
Increases in regional traffic volume and population growth prompted MediCorp Health System--the non-profit health system that owns Mary Washington Hospital--to pursue the idea of building a new hospital in Stafford to serve its growing community.
They believed that by 2015, it would take most Stafford County residents more than half an hour to reach Mary Washington Hospital, which was an unacceptably long travel time for a densely populated suburban region.
In Virginia, persons wishing to build new medical care facilities are required to get a Certificate of Public Need from the state health commissioner, a process that includes an administrative hearing, known as an informal fact-finding conference (IFFC).
Matthew D. Jenkins, a partner at Hunton & Williams in Richmond, handled the case for MediCorp.
The right expert to validate traffic jam predictions
Jenkins needed to find an expert witness who could prove to an administrative hearing officer that his client's traffic-jam predictions had merit. He contacted the Round Table Group for help.
"I was looking for someone to effectively model the present and future burdens on a roadway system," Jenkins says. "I didn't just need a traffic engineer. I needed an expert who could predict future traffic patterns. An additional requirement was familiarity with the Virginia highway system. The Round Table Group gave me one name: Antoine Hobeika."
Finding an individual with traffic prediction expertise, particularly for the Virginia area, was no easy task. Mark Swansiger acted as the researcher for Round Table Group. As he says, "Because this was a niche issue, finding Dr. Hobeika was a particularly difficult and time-consuming process."
Swansiger began with a search of Round Table Group's extensive internal database of experts, and performed scholarly journal searches through Google Scholar™ (Beta). Even with his impressive search skills, he was unable to turn up the right person quickly. "It wasn't as helpful as I'd hoped--there's not a lot written about transportation patterns in Virginia."
Swansiger researched Virginia universities, looking for solid transportation departments or statistics departments, keeping an eye peeled for programs with any emphasis on traffic patterns.
Swansiger's diligence paid off when he found Dr. Antoine Hobeika at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Hobeika was a miracle find, working at one of the best civil engineering departments in the state. In fact, Dr. Hobeika periodically does work for the state of Virginia regarding these same types of topics.
Dr. Hobeika, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech, specializes in traffic analysis and knows the state's roadways well. Swansiger prepared a Knowledge Portfolio, which included Hobeika's personal statement (a summary of his experiences in relationship to the topic), billing rates, and a formatted, easy-to-read resume, and presented it to Jenkins.
"A flexible thinker, curious and open-minded"
Jenkins and Hobeika met several times over a six-month period to discuss the case before the IFFC.
Jenkins thinks Hobeika may have initially doubted that future traffic patterns would indicate the need for a hospital in Stafford County, but when he studied the data, he realized it was true.
"You want an expert who is a flexible thinker, curious and open-minded, who is very comfortable discussing a case at the concept level," says Jenkins. "He did a brilliant job of developing a cohesive presentation: how the highway system would look, why the site proposed by MediCorp made the most sense and how it would improve timely access to hospital services. One alternative that had to be ruled out was the suggestion to make the existing hospital bigger. We needed to show that an addition wouldn't make the people in Stafford County any closer to the hospital, based on existing and future traffic congestion."
Hobeika developed a computer simulation of the Stafford County roadway network in the year 2015.
Vital testimony
Jenkins wisely brought his expert on early enough in the process for him to have sufficient time to get the job done. He advised that "it probably took Dr. Hobeika three months to put together his computer simulation. It would have been impossible for him to accomplish what he did in the span of a month."
As a result, "he could demonstrate, almost like turning on a water faucet, how traffic would flow, down to the phasing of the traffic signals," Jenkins says. "He figured out how much traffic is on the roads now, what the configuration of the roads would likely be in 2015, how much traffic will exist then and where people will live, to show that a substantial proportion of the Stafford County population will be more than 30 minutes away from Mary Washington Hospital."
Hobeika was the only traffic expert on the roster speaking on behalf of the MediCorp project in the course of a two-day IFCC in May.
"He was one of our principal witnesses," says Jenkins. "His testimony was vital for demonstrating the need for that hospital at that location. Dr. Hobeika provided a layperson's explanation of what we were trying to prove. He did an outstanding job."
In August, MediCorp was granted permission to build a new facility, Stafford Hospital Center, which is expected to open in 2009.
Lisa Fields can be reached at Lisa.F@BeTuitive.com.
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Expert Witness War Stories
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