42 | CLEVELAND JEWISH NEWS | CJN.ORG
HEALTH
MAY 13, 2016
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University Hospitals celebrates 150 years JONAH L. ROSENBLUM | STAFF REPORTER jrosenblum@cjn.org
of awe-inspiring,” said Dr. Dan Simon, president of University Hospitals’ Case Medical Center. Dr. Fred Rothstein, Simon’s predene of the top cancer centers in cessor, said, “It’s pretty amazing when the nation, according to U.S. you really get into all the details that News & World Report. One of the you really lose track of over time, the top three neonatolpeople that have come through and have ogy hospitals in the impacted the lives of hundreds and country, by the same thousands and hundreds of thousands ranking. A cuttingof people. It’s pretty overwhelming edge center of mediwhen you start to think about it from cal research in The that perspective.” Harrington DiscovUH will commemorate its milestone ery Institute. with an event May 14 at the Cleveland Who would’ve Convention Center. thought that UniverRothstein Rothstein and Simon stressed the sity Hospitals, begun importance of UH being an academic as a house on Wilson medical center. Street in 1866, would The impetus came from the indusend up housed in trialist Samuel Mather, who served as a endless glossy facilihospital trustee for 47 years, including ties across Northeast 32 years as board chairman. After visitOhio? ing Johns Hopkins hospital and medi“To think that cal school in Baltimore in 1891, Mather 150 years later, we’re became convinced of the synergy now 18 hospitals created when healing and learning are with 26,000 employSimon combined. That led to the 1895 affiliation ees, 40 ambulatory 2 1/28/16 PM with Case Western 2:54 Reserve University centers, $4ClevelandJewishNews.HA.4.75x5.25.012916.pdf billion in revenue, it’s sort
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School of Medicine. “It brings together the power of healing and teaching and discovery, and he recognized that the future of great medicine lay in the academic medical center model,” Rothstein said. “He was a great visionary, no doubt about it.” Mather’s vision led to a host of discoveries, Simon said. He cited Dr. Oscar D. Ratnoff, a CWRU and UH hematologist who died in 2008, and his research into blood clotting. He praised Claude Beck, who pioneered heart surgery, including operations to improve circulation in damaged heart muscles, as well as ways to revive heart attack victims that included the defibrillator and CPR. University Hospitals also played a critical role in the response to the AIDS crisis, with Ratnoff and Dr. Michael Lederman describing the occurrence of AIDS-related immune deficiency in otherwise healthy men with hemophilia in 1983, authoring hundreds of pieces on how HIV induces immune deficiency and establishing the Special Immunology Unit at UH in 1985, Northeast Ohio’s first dedicated HIV clinic. “We’re an academic medical center and it’s very important to understand what an academic medical center is,” Simon said. “It’s not a community hospital. It’s very interested in a healthy community, it’s very interested in delivering care, but its mission is much greater than care delivery.” If the system’s research is long established, its expansion is new and exciting. “The real growth and the consolidation of the market really began in the early- to mid-90s and that’s when all of the acquisitions really started to happen and we’ve grown tremendously ever since that time,” Rothstein said. The Seidman Cancer Center, opened in 2011, was one example, a personal one, for Bob Gries, hospital trustee for 39 years, given that his parents had been treated for cancer at UH. “When they built it, they were very careful to really consider what was important for patients,” Gries said. “They really took treating cancer to another
Dr. Herman Hellerstein, pictured in the 1970s, was a famed University Hospitals cardiologist whose 1950s research helped in the rehabilitation of heart attack patients who might have previously been forced into premature retirement. | Photo / University Hospitals
level.” Despite all the growth, Rothstein said the system has never lost track of its mission. “We have been a community asset for 150 years and we’ve continued to be there 24/7, 365 days a year independent of people’s ability to pay,” Rothstein said. “For me, that’s really one of the bellwethers of why I stayed at UH – because of the great things that we do for the community that we have the privilege to serve.” Indeed, that’s what drew Barbara Robinson, currently on the Seidman Leadership Council. “I was really impressed and kept hearing that one of the main focuses of the hospital was care and patient care and caring and I had experienced that and I realized that it wasn’t just something that people said, that it actually was in practice there,” Robinson said.