Sacramento / NorCal

Henry Kaiser inducted to California Hall of Fame
This month, Henry J. Kaiser was inducted into Sacramento’s California Hall of Fame for his innovations in health care and manufacturing.  In 1938, Kaiser offered employees the world’s first prepaid health plan, and in 1945, the Kaiser Permanente Health Care Plan was first offered to the public. Since then, Kaiser Permanente, based in Oakland, has grown to become the nation’s largest health maintenance organization.

Bay Area

St. Helena Hospital opens Martin-O’Neil cancer center
St. Helena Hospital opened its Martin-O’Neil Cancer Center in late November to serve patients in North Bay counties with medical, radiation and surgical oncology in one location. The cancer center occupies a 12,500-square-foot floor of the new Johnson Pavilion building, which also houses a state-of-the-art surgery floor. The $28.2 million project was funded by community donations to a capital campaign.

“We offer world-class care and technology and three types of oncology in one convenient location, but what will set us apart is how we have built the entire center around patients’ needs to give them and their families a positive, healing experience at a very difficult time in their lives,” said Gregory Smith, M.D., medical oncologist.  As medical director, Smith leads a medical team that includes David Tate, M.D., radiation oncologist who trained and taught at Stanford University Medical Center, and Pedro Ramirez, M.D., surgical oncologist who trained at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

SF health care organization changing name
The 25-year-old San Francisco-based health care consulting organization, formerly known as Lumetra, will now be called Lumetra Healthcare Solutions. The name and logo change are accompanied by a restructuring that includes the merger of its Illumisys division into Lumetra and a reorganization of client services.

“The needs of health care business are changing, driven as much by economic necessity as by pending reform legislation,” said Linda  Sawyer, Ph.D., RN, and CEO of Lumetra. “Our nation’s health care system can no long afford to solve problems in silos. We need comprehensive solutions that enable health care to do more with less while improving patient outcomes.”

Sequoia Hospital wins  for stroke care award
Sequoia Hospital has received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines Stroke Silver Plus Performance Achievement Award.  The award recognizes Sequoia Hospital’s commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of stroke care by ensuring that stroke patients receive treatment according to nationally accepted standards and recommendations.

According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is the third leading cause of death in the United States and a leading cause of serious, long-term disability.  On average, someone suffers a stroke every 45 seconds; someone dies of a stroke every three minutes; and 795,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.

Silicon Valley

Stanford study finds dialysis may not help nursing home patients
Older Americans living in nursing homes experience a significant decline in their ability to perform simple daily tasks after starting dialysis, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Starting dialysis to treat kidney failure did not help nursing home patients maintain or improve their functional capacity, said Manjula Kurella Tamura, M.D., lead author of the Stanford study.

The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

El Camino Hospital expands robotic surgery program
El Camino recently expanded its minimally invasive surgical program to three da Vinci Si HD Surgical Systems, which will be used to perform prostate cancer, gynecologic and bariatric surgeries at its Mountain View and Los Gatos campuses. El Camino physicians performed more than 500 robotic surgeries over the last year and expect the number to increase in 2010 as more physicians undergo training with the enhanced equipment.

“Surgeries with the assistance of these new state-of-the art systems have the potential to let patients have shorter hospital stays, fewer complications, less pain, less scarring and quicker recovery times,” said Albert Pisani, M.D., a board-certified gynecologic oncologist on staff at El Camino Hospital who has performed more than a quarter of the robotic surgeries at the hospital.

In other El Camino Hospital news, it was recently referenced as “the most technologically advanced hospital in the world” by Popular Science Magazine in the “100 Best Innovations” Dec. 2009 issue.

Stanford physician receives mentorship award from AHA
D. Craig Miller, M.D., was recently awarded the Eugene Braunwald Academic Mentorship Award from the American Heart Association for his 30-year record of training, mentoring and enriching the career development of emerging cardiovascular surgeons and researchers. Since 1978, Miller has directly trained 107 cardiovascular surgeons and mentored 55 laboratory research fellows during his tenure at Stanford University Medical Center.

Stanford lists consulting activities for faculty members on Web site
Stanford University School of Medicine has joined a small cadre of medical schools in publicly disclosing information about the consulting activities of its 1,400 affiliated faculty.

While researchers and clinicians have been required every year to report their relationships with private industry as part of the school’s process of managing potential conflicts of interest, the school’s posting of this information on the Internet aims to make it widely available to the public.

“I have tremendous respect for the integrity of our faculty at Stanford and respect the collaborative work they do to advance knowledge and, where appropriate, to engage in effective interactions with industry,” said Philip Pizzo, M.D., dean of the School of Medicine. “Because perceptions about such interactions can sometimes be misleading, we have come to the conclusion that public disclosure serves the best interests of our faculty, Stanford University and the public we serve.”

 Hospice of the Valley names Slatkin as Chief Medical Officer
Neal Slatkin, M.D., a nationally renowned neurologist and palliative care physician, was named Chief Medical Officer of Hospice of the Valley, a leading South-Bay provider in advancing palliative end-of-life and grief-care in Northern California. Slatkin will oversee a team of hospice physicians and have overall responsibility for the medical direction, palliative care program development and supervision of patient care.

Stanford nabs 13 top NIH awards for high-stakes research
Scientists at Stanford University’s School of Medicine and School of Engineering have earned 13 of the National Institutes of Health prizes intended to encourage “out-of-the-box,” high-stakes research that carries much risk of failure, but offers the potential for huge benefits if successful.

Stanford faculty will be attempting to grow a human intestine, to identify hormones in the placenta that influence brain development and to determine whether the lack of infections at an early age are the cause of the childhood obesity epidemic, among other projects.

Award recipients include Euan Ashley, M.D., Ph.D., Ajay Chawla, M.D., Ph.D., Chang-Zheng Chen, Ph.D., Markus Covert, Ph.D., Sarah Heilshorn, Ph.D., Andrew Hoffman, M.D., K.C. Huang, Ph.D., Calvin Kuo, M.D., Ph.D., Julie Parsonnet, Ph.D., Anna Penn, M.D., Ph.D., Krishna Shenoy, Ph.D., Justin Sonnenburg, Ph.D., and Joseph Wu, M.D., Ph.D.