CommunityLink

Springfield, OR

Health Care

By Lottie Poe Duey

In May 2005, McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center turns 50. Like many baby boomers, the hospital is determined to age well and to make the necessary choices to promote a long and productive existence.
In the coming months, McKenzie-Willamette plans some exciting innovations.

• A $2.2 million diagnostic cardiac lab is scheduled to open in December 2004. This cardiovascular (heart and blood vessels) imaging lab is being added to help serve the growing number of people age 55 and over who have heart or circulation health concerns. Oregon Cardiology PC provided McKenzie-Willamette with invaluable advice and guidance in setting up this new lab.
• Red Hot Mamas, a women’s health program for menopausal women, begins in 2005. At monthly meetings, local health care professionals will lead discussions about various topics of interest. Participants will receive up-to-date, well-researched information; have access to group discussions; and be eligible for a free monthly e-mail newsletter, The Menopause Minute.
• And most exciting of all — a brand new McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center is to be built. Negotiations are underway for a site, and in September 2004 facility planning began. An important consideration is the scope of the new building. Triad recently built new hospitals in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Las Cruces, New Mexico. Both of these hospitals experienced very high occupancy within the first six months of operation and commenced additional construction within two years of reopening.

Wherever the replacement hospital is built, McKenzie-Willamette will continue to bring innovative, high-quality health care to Lane County. The new medical structure will benefit from partner company Triad’s recent years of experience building hospitals. (In 2003 Triad Hospitals Inc. of Plano, Texas, the third-largest health care corporation in the United States, became McKenzie-Willamette’s partner.)

Thanks to Triad’s capital investment, in 2004 McKenzie-Willamette was able to accelerate the purchase of highly sophisticated equipment, including a $150,000 neurosurgical microscope, updated lab microscopes, ventilators and colonoscopes. This newer technology means increased comfort and enhanced healing and safety for patients. The equipment’s ease of use, clarity of images and documentation improves overall efficiency and satisfaction for patients, physicians and staff.

As any boomer knows, making good choices is a big part of aging well. McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center
is making smart decisions, today, to ensure that we can continue providing our community extraordinary care for years to come.

Future Medical Miracles:

Sacred Heart Medical Center is already among the nation’s leaders in many areas of medical technology. Hospital administrator Jill Hoggard Green says, “We’re keeping our technology very current.” But there are limits to what can be done in a facility built for the medicine of the last century; this makes the plans being laid for Sacred Heart at RiverBend that much more exciting, Hoggard Green says.

General surgery is one of the areas that Sacred Heart has recently upgraded — and it will be upgraded even more at RiverBend. A year ago the hospital completed construction of Lane County’s first two minimally invasive surgical suites, designed to facilitate laparoscopic (abdominal) and arthroscopic (in joints, especially the knee) procedures.

In each case a lighted tube is inserted in a small incision to give the surgeon a picture of what’s inside. The surgeon then inserts surgical equip­­ment through another site to perform the procedure. This type of surgery, where appropriate, can greatly decrease complications and speed up recovery.

At the Sacred Heart Medical Center campus at RiverBend, all operating rooms will be designed to accommodate minimally invasive surgery as well as robotic surgery. They will also have what’s called a “digital backbone,” giving clinicians immediate access to every piece of information they need to know about the patient, from medication allergies to detailed imaging studies. The current Sacred Heart facility is already halfway there with its all-digital imaging technology, known as the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS).

And even before founding the Oregon Heart & Vascular Institute last spring, Sacred Heart was already a leader in the use of stent technology to open clogged arteries.

Sacred Heart has also pioneered a system of care designed to coordinate and centralize all aspects of a patient’s treatment. “In traditional hospitals, interventional treatment and surgery are separated,” Hoggard Green explains. “But care is now interdisciplinary.”

Design of OHVI facilities at RiverBend will further promote that interdisciplinary approach to treatment by co-locating all the relevant clinicians and services. Furthermore, larger and more flexible operating rooms will allow either surgery or interventional procedures to be done in the same place, “so the clinician can determine what level of care and what technology he or she wants to use,” Hoggard Green says.

Most new developments in medical technology you read about in the news are already in place at Sacred Heart. Artificial disks? Surgeons here currently provide them to patients through cutting-edge research studies. And what’s not in place now is in the planning for Sacred Heart at RiverBend.

Neonatal intensive care? “We will have phenomenally more control over the environment and better access for families,” says Hoggard Green. “There are no barriers.”