What’s Your Specialty?

Atlanta Offers a Number of Outstanding Medical Centers that Provide Nationally Acclaimed Treatments

By Lissa Poirot

The thought might not cross your mind when you visit a loved one that’s ill, a friend recuperating from surgery or a family member having a baby, but all hospitals are not created equal. Should you ever need a hospital for specialty services, rest assured our city is host to some of the best medical centers in the country. We took a glance at the hospitals in your neighborhood to find which ones feature specialty services not often found in local hospitals, and those that rivaled our nation’s best.

CATASTROPHIC AND REHABILITATION CARE
Shepherd Center
2020 Peachtree Road NW
Atlanta, GA 30309
404-352-2020
www.shepherdcenter.org

    Catastrophic and rehabilitation care is a specialized field, and while area hospitals may have departments providing both services, only one hospital in Atlanta specifically focuses its care on neurological disorders, including spinal cord injury, acquired brain injury and multiple sclerosis treatment and care, while treating more multiple trauma victims than any other national center. This is not your rehab center for torn ligaments. This is the Shepherd Center.
     The center was founded in 1975 after James Shepherd, a then-recent University of Georgia graduate, was paralyzed from the neck down from a bodysurfing accident in Rio de Janeiro. He spent two and a half months paralyzed, but eventually made what some would say to be a miraculous recovery. Shepherd credits his recovery to the care and rehabilitation he received at Denver’s Craig Hospital. Disappointed he couldn’t get the same care in Atlanta, he founded the Shepherd Center and modeled it after Craig.
    “We had an unserved community in the Southeast. Atlanta was supposed to be this cosmopolitan city and we couldn’t provide care,” said Shepherd, who serves as the Center’s CEO. “Shepherd Center is the only place in Atlanta dedicated to catastrophic and rehabilitation for neurological disorders.”
It all began with six beds in a leased space in an Atlanta hospital. Shepherd’s goal was to reach 22 beds within three years. Instead, he filled them in 18 months, highlighting the need for the treatment center in Atlanta. Today, the Shepherd Center is a 100-bed, state-of-the-art facility in its 225,000-square-foot home on Peachtree, with an additional 173,000 square feet planned to open at the end of 2007.
     Annually, the Shepherd Center receives nearly 30,000 outpatient visits and more than 850 admitted patients where intensive care, spinal cord injury and acquired brain injury services are rendered. The U.S. News & World Report has listed the Shepherd Center as one of the best hospitals in the country — one of only 176 of the country’s 6,007 medical centers to do so. The center is the largest of the country’s 16 National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research Spinal Cord Injury Model Centers and one of a few facilities in the country equipped to serve patients paralyzed from the neck down and requiring a ventilator to breathe.
    “There is only one other center like ours nationally, which is Craig Hospital, that has the scope of services we provide. I
modeled Shepherd Center after it. It was and still is a 70-bed hospital and we’re at 100 beds, so we’ve moved beyond their scope,” Shepherd said.

Nurse's station at Children's at Egleston

PEDIATRIC CARE
Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
Children’s at Egleston
Children’s at Scottish Rite
Children’s at Hughes Spalding
1001 Johnson Ferry Road NE
Atlanta, GA 30342
404-250-KIDS
www.choa.org

    When it comes to children’s care, there is one leader in the Atlanta area — Children’s Healthcare. This healthcare system is renowned nationally, oft recognized as one of the best in children’s services. U.S. News & World Report ranked Children’s as one of the top pediatric hospitals in the country for three consecutive years. Child magazine ranked it one of the top 10 children’s hospitals nationwide, including third-place rankings for its cancer center, neonatal intensive care unit and orthopaedics, as well as ranking them fourth for heart services.
     “Pediatric care represents only about 10 percent of care in the United States, so we provide a niche to care specifically for kids,” said Donna Hyland, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta COO. “There are fundamental services we need to do as well as other children’s hospitals, but we also target sub-specialties in pediatric medicine to set the standard for how well kids get treated nationally. We have a number of services targeted as national excellence programs, such as our cancer program, our neonatal intensive care unit and our heart center. We want to offer these sub-specialties so parents won’t have to travel outside of Georgia to get treatment for their child.”
     Children’s Healthcare formed in 1998 when Egleston Children’s Health Care System and Scottish Rite Children’s Medical Center united. Pediatric specialties include:

• AFLAC Cancer Center, which treats more than 300 new cancer patients each year and follows nearly 1,500 children with sickle cell disease, hemophilia and other bleeding disorders. The center also conducts research and teaching in collaboration with Emory Healthcare.
  
• High-risk newborn services with access to more than 400 clinical providers in more than 30 pediatric, medical and surgical specialties in its 67-bed Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
  
• Orthopaedic services that include treatment of more than 3,000 sports injuries and scoliosis screenings for more than 65,000 children, as well as providing surgery and treatment of trauma, cerebral palsy, neuro-muscular conditions and more.
  
• Children’s Sibley Heart Center, which provides cardiac services for congenital and acquired heart disease for nearly 30,000 children each year.
  
• Transplant services for pediatric heart, kidney, liver, blood and marrow transplants in which the hospital has averaged 20 transplants a year since 2001.

    “I have two children and as a mom, you always want the best for them,” Hyland said. “I’m so thankful, as a mom, that Children’s is here. I hope that my children won’t need to go to the hospital. But if they do, they’ll be in excellent care.”
     Children’s has grown to include its Hughes Spalding location, which began operations earlier this year. The 24-hour emergency care hospital houses the only poison center and hospital-based dental service provider in Georgia and features a pediatric intensive care unit, while treating a number of pediatric conditions annually, including allergies, asthma, seizures and diabetes.

Northside Hopital's Forsyth location

WOMEN’S, TRANSPLANT & SURGICAL CARE
Northside Hospital
Northside Hospital-Atlanta,
Sandy Springs
Northside Hospital-Cherokee, Canton
Northside Hospital-Forsyth, Cumming
404-851-8000
www.northside.com

    Northside Hospital system operates not one, but three hospitals plus 15 outpatient centers and medical buildings specifically for Atlanta’s Northside communities. And with nearly 1,800 physicians on-staff, they treat more than 600,000 people each year. With numbers like that, it’s no surprise Northside is a leader in the healthcare community. But Northside’s specialty services are what make it, well, special, including its renowned labor and delivery services.
     Women have long turned to Northside Hospital for its excellent care in labor and delivery; the hospital delivers more babies than any other hospital in the country, nearly 18,000 a year to be exact. These numbers are the reason the hospital recently opened a $42.2-million, 103,000-square-foot maternity and newborn services center at its Cumming location. But you may not be aware that Northside’s surgical and oncology care are equally impressive.
“We’re well known for being the largest OB hospital in the nation, but at Northside, our motto is to provide a lifetime of care,” said Patti Owen, director of oncology services. “We see more breast cancer and gynecological cancer than any other medical center in the state of Georgia. The women’s oncology specialty is one of our areas of focus.”
    In fact, Northside prides itself on providing a comprehensive, full-spectrum program that includes prevention, education, clinical
research and treatment, as well as support and rehabilitation services in all areas of
oncology, including leukemia and blood and marrow transplant programs, which services patients who have hematological malignancies and select solid tumor diseases.
    “We are also one of the largest blood and marrow transplant and leukemia programs in the Southeast. Our physicians were the first in Georgia to perform unmatchable donor bone marrow transplants, and we’re still one of the few community hospitals to provide this service,” Owen said.
And if it’s surgery you need, Northside’s second-highest volume of procedures is its surgical services. “We perform 127 surgeries a day,” said John Salandi, manager of operations. “The volume of surgical procedures we do and the number of skilled physicians we have — 500 different surgeons in a 12 month period — makes surgery one of our leading specialties.”
     Northside’s main hospital is located just inside the Perimeter at Johnson Ferry and Peachtree Dunwoody, but its newest hospital in Cumming is providing care without the drive for many of its patients. The location, which opened in 2002, launched its expanded surgical and ancillary services in July and received approval in May from the Georgia State Department of Community Health to offer maternity and newborn health services to provide one more welcome home to Atlanta’s growing population.

CARDIOVASCULAR & ORTHOPAEDIC CARE
Saint Joseph’s
5665 Peachtree Dunwoody Road NE
Atlanta, GA 30342
404-851-7001
www.stjosephsatlanta.org

    The oldest hospital in Atlanta, which opened more than 130 years ago, Saint Joseph’s appears on “best” lists on a national level: U.S. News and World Report named it one of the best in orthopaedics, Money magazine named it best in heart and vascular care, and health-care industry source Solucient named it the best cardiovascular hospital six times, as well as a top orthopaedic hospital. The hospital treats more than 130,000 outpatients and 20,000 inpatients annually in its 410-bed acute-care facility.
     Cardiovascular care deserves its nationally acclaimed top rankings. Saint Joseph’s was the first Southeastern hospital to perform open-heart surgery and today provides 1,700 surgeries each year. The hospital was also the first to offer angioplasty as an alternative to bypass surgery, and the first to develop a comprehensive cardiac catheterization laboratory, performing more than 4,200 and 8,300 of these services, respectively, each year. Saint Joseph’s is also one of only two adult heart transplant centers in the state of Georgia. The hospital was the first in the state — and one of only a few nationally — to perform robotic-assisted, totally endoscopic, closed-chest heart surgery, and trains surgeons from around the world on this procedure. Saint Joseph’s performs nearly 1,600 vascular surgery procedures annually. Numbers like these are the reason the hospital is well recognized throughout the nation.
    “We performed the first pump open-heart case in the country and from that, we built a very large cardiac service,” said Dr. Gene Davidson, interim CEO at St. Joseph’s Hospital. “We have the only robotic heart surgery program in the state and our program is one of the largest in the Southeast, with three DaVinci systems, including the latest model that was upgraded at the end of 2005. We also have one of the largest vascular programs in the state. A large number of patients and our programs attract better physicians and they build on each other to create what we have become today.”
     In orthopaedics, Saint Joseph’s performs 59 percent more procedures with 31 percent lower complication rates and shorter hospital stays than any other hospital. The hospital’s Center for Orthopaedic Care, which treats severe fractures, as well as arthritis-, athletic- or work-related injuries, provides realignments, ligament repairs, cartilage transplants and joint replacements, with many procedures available as minimally invasive operations for faster rehabilitation time, including next-day checkout following a hip replacement, according to Davidson.
    “We have one of the largest orthopaedic physicians groups in the country working at St. Joseph’s,” Davidson said. “There has been a tremendous increase in the number of people getting new knees and hips and the ability to deal with that and improve the length of time people spend in hospitals has developed our growth in this discipline. The hospital, as a whole, deals with a very sick segment of the population and we have the highest case index of the state, meaning we treat more sick people than anyone in Georgia.”

CANCER & CARDIOVASCULAR CARE
WellStar Health System
Cobb Hospital, Austell
Kennestone Hospital, Marietta
Windy Hill Hospital, Marietta
770-956-STAR
www.wellstar.org

    Northwest communities don’t need to enter the Perimeter to receive outstanding specialty medical services. Not when the WellStar Health System features hospitals in Marietta and Austell (as well as two others in Westside communities in Paulding and Douglas counties) with a goal of providing a fully integrated, accessible, multi-disciplinary, state-of-the-art, high-quality and compassionate care in northwest Georgia.
     WellStar’s system specializes in cancer care, serving nearly 3,000 cancer patients each year, the majority of which are breast, lung, colon and prostate patients. In fact, the WellStar Cancer Program is the largest cancer network program approved by the American College of Surgeon’s Commission on Cancer in the United States, and the fifth health system across the country to have received this recognition. Its program has grown 43 percent in five years and provides two programs unique to the state of Georgia: its Specialty Teams and Treatments (STAT) Cancer Clinic and CyberKnife technology.
     STAT teams consist of nurses, oncologists, surgeons, pathology and radiology specialists, social services and even dietitians to work alongside patients to provide full-service cancer care, including the opportunity to meet all specialists needed to review a patient’s condition in one day.
    “Most hospitals have a conference where specialists are brought together to review a patient,” said Don Burton, executive director of oncology services. “At WellStar, we take it a step further and the patient gets to see all of the specialists at the same time. Typically when a patient is diagnosed, he is sent to specialists to review treatment options, which could take weeks. Here, our specialists are together to examine and question the patient and to determine the best treatment plan, turning weeks into days.”
     Remaining up-to-date on progressive procedures, Kennestone Hospital was recently approved by the state to provide CyberKnife cancer technology, which is a robotic device that precisely targets high doses of radiation at tumors. The hospital anticipates performing the state’s first CyberKnife procedure by the end of the summer and has found that, nationally, patients prefer the treatment to surgery because there is no pain or side effects. Burton also points out that the precision can even target tumors formerly untreatable, such as spinal cord tumors.
     Heart health is also an important component of WellStar’s services, as it was the first hospital system in Cobb County to provide open-heart surgery in December 2004. Since then, the cardiac surgery at Kennestone provides more than 550 procedures and more than 1,000 interventions annually.
    “Our cardiac surgery program offers the most sophisticated kinds of treatment available,” said Pat Jansen, executive director of cardiac services at WellStar.
    “We do a number of open-heart surgeries using off-pump procedures that help patients recover more quickly and doesn’t stop the heart during surgery. Our cardiac surgery allows blocked arteries to be opened with tiny catheters inserted into blood vessels. Most states, including Georgia, do not allow this type of procedure unless you have a cardiac surgery program as a backup.”
     WellStar sees more than 20,000 patients experiencing chest pain annually, and its Kennestone location is one of the busiest Emergency Departments in the state, where chest pain care is often administered. Its heart health services have received accreditation from the Society of Chest Pain Centers, meaning the hospital has met some of the highest standards for treating chest pain, Jansen said.

CANCER CARE
Emory Winship Cancer Institute
1365-C Clifton Road NE
Atlanta, GA 30322
404-778-1900
www.winshipcancerinstitute.org

    When it comes to cancer treatment, only one center in Atlanta is specifically dedicated to the treatment and research of cancer: Winship Cancer Institute, a part of Emory Healthcare’s many medical centers.
     Winship opened its doors in 1937 when Coca-Cola president Robert Woodruff lost his mother to cancer. In 2003, it opened its new state-of-the-art facility, all 280,000 square feet of it, which operates its original departments, as well as new research and high-tech treatment facilities. As a member of the academic community, Winship has renowned physicians and researchers from top medical schools like Harvard University and Johns Hopkins, as well as its own pool of medical professionals from Emory’s School of Medicine, Rollins School of Public Health, and Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing.
    “The Emory Winship Cancer Institute is unique in Georgia because, as an academic cancer facility, our goal is to conduct groundbreaking scientific research and apply what we learn from that research to the care and treatment of our patients,” said Lee Finkelstein, director of clinical trials and development and regulatory affairs. “We often talk about the concept of ‘bench to bedside,’ because we are translating science into treatment. Our patients benefit from having the absolute latest cancer treatment available to them through a wide range of clinical trials we run here at Winship.”
     As a partner in the Georgia Cancer Coalition, Winship is united with Georgia’s leading hospitals, universities, biotech firms, civic groups and nonprofit and government agencies that share its findings in cancer research. “One thing we stress is strong community relationships,” Finkelstein added.     “As a member of an academic facility, we are part of a consortium of other top research facility centers, which means we share our research. Emory Healthcare also stresses collaboration between its departments and physicians. Our physicians, nurses and nurse practitioners, as well as surgeons and
radiation oncologists meet regularly to review our patients’ care and treatment progress. We truly take a team approach so every patient receives the benefit of expertise from each specialist who is involved in his or her care. It’s a strong advantage that our patients can see multiple physicians to best treat their cancer.”
     Winship is working to meet the National Cancer Institute’s designation as a comprehensive cancer center. With this designation — the first in the state — the Institute will receive federal funding to ensure that further research and new treatments are developed to help not only its patients, but also those battling cancer around the world. “Being a comprehensive cancer center is a status that designates us as one of the top cancer research centers in the country, along the likes of such institutes as Vanderbilt University. It allows us to have federal funding to better attract the country’s elite scientists and researchers to study new cancer treatments,” Finkelstein continued.