If you haven’t driven by or walked along 16th and Senate recently, you may be surprised at how much the area has changed. On the south side of Garage 1, Clarian’s first completed People Mover Station can be seen. Train tracks glide out of the station to the east before curving across 16th Street and disappearing south down Senate. At 11th Street, the tracks turn west and continue toward the under-construction IU Hospital, Riley Hospital and Canal Street stations. 
   Sitting atop the tracks outside the Methodist Station is Clarian’s first train car. One of two trains that will run along Clarian’s monorail system, the car was unveiled Wednesday, May 22 – exactly one year after construction began on the People Mover.

Five-minute “shirtsleeves” ride
Clarian (Methodist-IU-Riley) admits more than 57,000 inpatients annually. During the first quarter of 2002, 145 solid organ transplant procedures and 43 bone marrow transplants were completed at its hospitals. Nearly 250 patients were scheduled for surgical procedures the day of the unveiling. Bill Loveday, president and CEO of Clarian Health Partners, cited those and other patient care statistics to illustrate for the media attending the unveiling how important the People Mover’s “five-minute, shirtsleeves ride” will be to furthering the high volume of work done at Clarian.
   In addition, Clarian announced in February its plans to build a state-of-the-art laboratory facility along the People Mover route at the top of the canal, near 11th Street and Martin Luther King Drive. “The People Mover track provides us with the opportunity to develop a single, state-of-the-art laboratory in one location, and to attach our tube system to it so specimens can be transported to the new single-lab location,” says Loveday.

Move more freely; share more easily
“Clarian is the state’s hospital leader in research and education of health care professionals, through our relationship to Indiana University School of Medicine, Indiana University School of Nursing, 20- plus Allied Health programs and the Methodist Research Institute,” says Loveday. “When the People Mover cars take their first trip down the guideway early next year it will mark a new era for Clarian by enabling people to move more freely and easily.”
   “The IU School of Medicine educates the secondlargest body of students in the country,” says D. Craig Brater, MD, dean of the school. “On any given day, nearly 600 of our residents are learning clinical skills on rotations at IU, Riley and Methodist hospitals and other facilities. Hundreds of medical students add to the numbers moving around the campuses every day. The monorail will enable our IU medical staff, residents and students to have easier access to all Clarian and nearby affiliated facilities, such as Wishard Memorial Hospital and the Roudebush VA Medical Center.
   “It’s more than a People Mover,” adds Brater. “It’s a vehicle that will propel us into the future of medicine.”