NorthBay Medical Center brings open-heart surgery to Solano County

NorthBay Medical Center brings open-heart surgery to Solano County
East Bay Business Times - by Marie-Anne Hogarth

NorthBay Medical Center will invest almost $10 million to start Solano County's first open-heart surgery program.

The Fairfield hospital hired Diana Sullivan, a hospital administrator from New York City's Beth Israel Medical Center, to run the new program. Sullivan, who directed the 1,368-bed Manhattan facility's heart institute and has experience developing hospital-based cardiac programs, arrived in January and will spearhead development of NorthBay's program set to launch this spring.

The 132-bed Fairfield hospital also plans to start treating patients with blocked coronary arteries in its newly built cardiac catheterization lab, where it will use stents and angioplasty balloons and other techniques.

Hospital administrators hope the new program will "fill the gap" for medical care for some 1,400 people who currently travel outside of the county for inpatient services, including heart care. The county has a population of about half a million people.

NorthBay and other hospitals in Solano County treat heart attack patients, but they are currently transferred if they require open heart surgery.

The program could give NorthBay an edge in the Solano market over Kaiser Permanente, which is planning to open a hospital in nearby Vacaville in spring 2009, but sends heart patients to Oakland for surgery. NorthBay is sandwiched between heart surgery programs at Queen of the Valley Medical Center in Napa and John Muir Health in Concord, which is building a new patient tower with three stories devoted to a cardiovascular institute.

Significantly, the new program will serve the hospital's strategy of focusing its efforts on vital services that can only be provided through inpatient care, said NorthBay CEO Gary Passama. That could be critical as more services move beyond hospital walls, and the pool of money from government payers like Medi-Cal and Medicare shrinks.

"Hospitals are seeing a lot of what they are doing moving to outpatient care," said Passama. "This helps us to replace revenue that is lost as procedures move to outpatient areas and from the large amount of bad debt that we take on."

NorthBay's open-heart surgery program will serve 100 patients in the first year, and ramp up to between 200 and 300 by the third and fourth years, Passama projected.

In its 24-hour cardiac catheterization lab, the hospital plans to treat between 300 and 400 patients through "interventional" procedures using stents and other devices. Officials hope to build up to 800 or 1,000 patients by the third and fourth years. Although NorthBay has had a cardiac catheterization laboratory for 15 years, it has for the most part used it for diagnosis by injecting dye to see a blockage in an artery.

Dr. Jeffrey Breneisen, medical director of cardiology for NorthBay, said that having surgical backup on-site wasn't necessarily a requirement for treating patients with coronary blockages in the catheterization lab. Still, he said, the surgery program would provide important backup to the lab and help ensure surgeons remain "involved" and don't "just dabble" in the program.

NorthBay administrators are pitching their new program as a "one-stop shop," which begins when a patient calls 911. Paramedics send results of a 12-lead EKG from the field to the hospital, where a physician can activate the cardiac catheterization team from the emergency department.

As part of its investment, NorthBay spent $3.6 million last year rebuilding and expanding its cardiac catheterization lab, which now measures 3,600 square feet.

Passama said he was also expecting "momentarily" the state's approval to spend some $4.8 million to build an 8,000-square-foot operating room for the heart surgery program that will be twice the size of standard operating rooms. The build-out would take six months and NorthBay hopes to perform its first open-heart surgery sometime next April.

The hospital will also invest $1 million to provide more than 12,000 hours of training to more than 50 clinical staff in areas of the hospital ranging from the emergency department to the intensive care and telemetry units.

The hospital has also signed contracts with three surgeons from Queen of the Valley in Napa - Drs. Robert Klingman, Ramzi Deeik and Peter Caravella - who will operate out of both facilities, as well as several perfusionists, technical specialists of the the heart-lung machine used during cardiac surgery.

NorthBay is currently recruiting for about eight more staff members, including a nurse practitioner, clinical nurse specialists, nurses skilled in harvesting veins for use in cardiac bypass surgery, and anesthesiologists.

"Honestly, there is no department that is not impacted by the evolution of these services," Sullivan said. "From environmental service to the biomed staff, it is literally everybody."

Sullivan said she was persuaded to come and work at NorthBay Medical Center largely because she was so impressed with the hospital's chief nursing officer, Kathy Richerson.

mhogarth@bizjournals.com | 925-598-1432