By Jim Baer
St. Louis is known throughout the world for its superior
medical services and patient care. Whether it is a new facility, the innovation of the da Vinci robotic-assisted surgical system or revolutionary treatments for prostate cancer, the region is second to none.
Here’s an overview of what St. Louis’ finest medical centers are currently pioneering:
SSM St. Clare Health Center, Fenton
On March 30th, at the precise moment, SSM St. Joseph’s Hospital in Kirkwood, located on an 18-acre tract of land closed its doors after 57-years of glorious service, the new $236 million SSM St. Clare Hospital on 54-acres of land in Southwest St. Louis County opened as a replacement hospital, the first new facility in the region in nearly 30 years.
The new hospital on Bowles Avenue in Fenton could aptly be described in two words: “World Class.”
The art of healing has been integrated with nature’s comfort to restore the health of those being served. The walls are splashed in soft color pallets. Inbound patients are served by 30 emergency rooms with in-house radiation department and 154 private rooms are located on six floors of the patient tower. “We offer every possible service provided by any hospital, other than we are not a trauma center,” says Sherry Hausmann, president, SSM St. Clare. State regulations require trauma centers to be separated by at least 15 miles, and nearby St. Anthony’s falls within that radius.
St. Clare’s service area, which still includes Kirkwood and Webster Groves (six miles away) is a half million persons with a secondary area of another 600,000.
The expansive facility totals approximately 600,000 square feet, including a health center, doctors’ building and cancer treatment center.
The precise layout of surgical suites and hospital flow sets a unique design that should be duplicated by future planners. Each of the eight surgical suites has upwards of $300 to $400,000 worth of modern, sophisticated equipment. For the first time ever, surgeons will be able to use three dimensional flat-screened monitors while directing overhead lighting that leaves nary a shadow on the patient.
This hospital was designed and built over five years. “Nurses have driven the design of this hospital. Nothing was left out,” says Hausmann. “We finished this hospital with a wonderful design, but it is not opulent. We paid attention to efficiency and flow, and we worked extremely hard to take waste out of the system.” All patient records are paperless. Private rooms include floor to ceiling windows; comfortable bench seating and chairs for a dozen visitors, original donated oil paintings and locked drawers for prescriptions.
“We have three major stakeholder groups, and that’s who we are serving,” says Hausmann. Those are the employees; the physicians who need an efficient and effective environment and of course, the patients.”
Already in service, St. Clare Hospital will perform 8,000 procedures per year while treating 5,000 ambulatory cases and 40,000 emergency room visits yearly.
Washington University
Medical Center
At Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Drs. Jeffrey Michalski and Gerald Andriole are treating prostate patients with the TargetScan system®, a combined 3-D image acquisition with a stationary probe which gives much better targeting and outcomes.
“The conventional biopsy of the prostate is simply a crapshoot, it’s a lottery,” says
Dr. Andriole. We missed detecting a lot of cancers when we were using two-dimensional devices. The new system helps physicians plan and execute targeted prostate biopsies through accurate needle placement within a template which in turn, can provide confidence in identifying locations of significant cancer in the prostate.”
TargetScan is a development of Medical Technologies, based in St. Louis and directed by Dr. Robert Mills, president, Envisioneering Medical Technologies.
Dr. Michalski explains. “It was pretty simple. Dr. Mills discovered by the one touch of his iPhone, he could make rapid movements. We are doing that with our investigations with the TargetScan device.
“We had to turn a lot of wheels, manipulate devices, and change positioning and there was always movement with the patient. We found if the patient had stool or gas in their rectum, it would distort the gland. We need to plant needles exactly where they need to go to determine the exact amount of seeds necessary for treatment. The TargetScan allows for true, inter-operative planning and allows for a good quality of placement. This is giving us a better outcome,” he says.
“Now we can do a biopsy in a predictable way,” says Dr. Andriole. “This is giving us the highest probability to find cancer in the patient,” he says. Studies, backed by the British Journal of Urology have substantiated the excellent results of these two BJH urologists.
St. Luke’s Hospital,
Chesterfield
Dr. John McCarthy, partner with St. Louis Urological Surgeons takes all of his prostate patients to
St. Luke’s Hospital. He is doing procedures, including treatment for prostate cancer with the 16-month-old da Vinci robotic-surgical system. This system allows surgeons to perform complex, minimally invasive surgery for cancer patients, and is used for other treatments such as gynecological reconstruction.
“Our patients who come to us are much smarter and much savvier about various treatments today,” says Dr. McCarthy. “They want quicker recovery—they want minimal scars, and they want to be on their feet faster and back at work as soon as possible,” he relates.
St. Luke’s invested $1.4 million for this one-of-a-kind robotics system, a system where
Dr. McCarthy and his partners have been able to double their number of treatments.
“We have exceeded all of our expectations. We are twice as busy as we anticipated,” says Dr. McCarthy.
The patient is docked to the machine, and the doctor sits at a counsel safely in an adjoining room and the robot does the invasive work. “This procedure is patient driven. The hospital doesn’t make any more money with this procedure. In fact, they probably lose a little with each case. But they (the board) made a decision to provide us with a machine that will give us an advantage for all our patients. Results are that patients experience less blood loss. They have less pain; their catheter is removed inside a week, not the usual six to eight weeks in the past.”
“They (St. Luke’s) certainly did not rush into this. They studied its capabilities for a couple of years and when they realized that multiple disciplines could utilize it, they made the purchase,” says Dr. McCarthy.
Hospital President and CEO Gary Olson is pleased. “The da Vinci robotic-assisted surgical system is on the leading edge of healthcare. When you combine the technology with our excellent team of surgeons and clinical staff, you have patient care experience we are proud to provide,” says Olson.
St. John's Mercy, Creve Coeur
St. John’s Mercy NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) doubled in space almost overnight when the hospital opened up a second wing last fall. Up until then, all critical-needs babies were cared for in communal spaces in the second-floor North Wing and with that, 46 new private rooms (South pod area) came on line with 98 rooms eventually going into service when the new hospital patient tower is completed. Construction should wind up sometime in 2010.
“The babies in the North (unit) still have to share open space. That means lights are on, providing over stimulation for those who don’t need it. We have to cover some of the isolettes with towels,” says Michelle Sprague, RN, nurse manager for the NICU. “Doctors call this the Casino (area) with all the bells, lights and distractions going off all the time,” says Sprague.
The neonatologists who work in the unit found from long-term studies that children’s school work and even admission to college was affected negatively, going back to their earliest days of premature care.
The private rooms have created a whole new atmosphere for the hospital’s youngest and newest patients. “We call them hospital wombs, not rooms,” says Sprague. Parents can stay overnight with their babies in these beautifully appointed spaces.
Featured on the floors are eight gigantic flat-screened jumbo-tron monitors strategically placed throughout the pods. Nurses can read heart rates and check other vitals just by viewing the boards. All nurses are connected to text messaging and receive calls via the upgraded in-room monitors. Square footage for care in the NICU tripled overnight from 19,000 to 65,000.
The daily census in the unit averages 72 babies per day, and can go as high as 92. With twins, triplets and quads often sharing one room, the new pods will provide space for up to 120 babies. St. John’s has the only Level 3 NICU in St. Louis County.
“The new NICU is a great concept. We worked with architects, builders, doctors, and nurses and had input from the patients (parents) to build this unit,” says Dr. Bill Chao, neonatologist in the NICU.
When the future construction is complete, St. John’s anticipates 10,000 deliveries per year, with at least 10 percent requiring highly-specialized care in the NICU. “This is where life begins for many of our children,” says Sprague. Babies at St. John’s continue to receive exceptional developmental care, thanks to the 224 professionals who now have a vastly improved NICU unit.
St. Anthony’s Medical Center, South St. Louis County
Opened recently at the south end of the hospital’s campus is the new St. Anthony’s Heart and Surgical Pavilion. It includes 64 private patient rooms, a new 16-bed Surgical Intensive Care Unit; 10 state-of-the-art surgery suites and 34-same-day surgery rooms.
This is where James Scharff, M.D. and surgeon performs some 250 to 300 minimally invasive thoracotomy procedures per year.
Dr. Scharff is opening the chest cavity for life-saving procedures ranging from lung cancer to biopsies to tissue removal and heart valve replacement.
“The open incision for lung cancer patients can be quite difficult,” says Dr. Scharff. This involves the rib cage area and any movement can be painful. With the minimally invasive procedures our patients are experiencing less pain, having less chance of Pneumonia and are off narcotic drugs much quicker. I am seeing these surgically treated patients back in my office in just two to three weeks. They are returning to work much quicker, he says. For those who have been treated for lung diseases, the minimally invasive procedure allows for patients to get to their chemotherapy and radiation treatments much quicker.”
Dr. Scharff says the facilities at the new Heart and Surgical Pavilion are making all cases go much smoother. “Our operating rooms are set up for better usage. The latest and most modern technology has all been integrated into the design of the room,” he says.
Tom Rockers, president and CEO of
St. Anthony’s, realizes the importance of
Dr. Scharff and other surgeon’s techniques. “The minimally invasive thoracotomy procedure is a prime example of using the latest technology and surgical techniques to accomplish
St. Anthony’s mission of providing the best care to every patient, every day,” says Rockers. “Innovative procedures like this one are being performed daily at the new Heart and Surgical Pavilion, a facility that offers highly advanced surgical technology in the convenient and comfortable setting of a community hospital.”
Saint Louis University
Medical Center
Saint Louis University is setting a new standard for brain and tumor treatments in part because of the addition of the CyberKnife Stereotactic Radiosurgery system. Primarily, the CyberKnife is used for malignant and benign brain tumors; vascular malformations and extracranial tumors and lesions.
CyberKnife radiosurgery is a noninvasive radiation treatment that can be used as an alternative to open surgery. It uses image-guided robotics designed to destroy tumors with precisely directed beams of radiation. In many cases, it provides superior outcomes and quality of life for some patients with malignant and benign lesions of the brain, spine and neck. The CyberKnife uses high doses of focused radiation beams delivered from multiple points outside the body to irradiate a tumor or lesion.
“Cancer used to previously be a death sentence and we are providing hope to the hopeless,” says Dr. Richard Bucholz, a staff neurosurgeon at SLU. “We are able to pinpoint tumors precisely and save surrounding tissues.”
This represents a $4 million investment at SLU. The hospital has a second unit at SLU Hospital Lake St. Louis. “Cases are done there (at Lake St. Louis), but I monitor the cases by closed circuit television from here.”
Dr. Bucholz and the staff have been doing cranial surgery since 1987. The University became the first medical center outside Stanford Medical Center, Palo Alto, Calif. to adopt this method of treatment.
Damon Harbison, MBA, director Oncology services at SLU says this is a very reliable and precise system. “We are able to pinpoint our treatments within .5 millimeters. This is very important for those patients who were deemed previously inoperable.”
Harbison says SLU is more the tertiary type of medical center. “Mostly, we don’t handle the routine cases. More, we are doing the ‘Oh my God cases” that are often the cases where the patient is teetering on life and death.”
Dr. Bucholz, who treats upwards of 140 patients yearly with the CyberKnife, is very optimist about future outcomes.
“Cancer does not have to be a death sentence, and it can be controlled. We are aiming at offering our patients a better outcome and a better quality of life. My expectations are that I plan to spend the rest of my academic career learning better how to use this wonderful tool and find the best possible outcome for my patients,” he says.
