Hospitals' Accolades and New Offerings Result in Chart-Topping Care for Patients
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For Doctor’s Hospital at Renaissance, 2008 was a year of superlatives.
In May, the McAllen facility was named to the prestigious Thomson Reuters Top 100 Hospitals listing. DHR was among facilities recognized for significantly improving hospital-wide performance for five consecutive years.
Then three months later, DHR found itself on another major health-care “best of” list, as one of only 173 facilities nationwide to score enough points to be included in U.S. News & World Report’s annual America’s Best Hospitals survey. The magazine sifts through data from almost 5,500 medical centers to identify the qualifying hospitals.
Of the specialties surveyed, the hospital scored highest in heart and heart surgery, a program that is only 10 years old.
“Our heart team of physicians, nurses and other health-care professionals throughout the hospital earned this designation purely on the basis of objective data, especially our remarkably low mortality rate,” says Marissa Castañeda, chief operating officer at DHR. “We’ve proven in just a short amount of time we could build a program based on quality outcomes for patients and develop record high patient satisfaction.”
But DHR is hardly resting on its recent laurels. The hospital also has become a leader in the field of coronary artery bypass surgery. Along those lines, it was the first hospital in South Texas to use the daVinci robot for bypass surgery.
DHR’s accolades draw attention to a thriving health-care industry in the area, which includes a total of three major hospitals.
At Rio Grande Regional Hospital, leadership has taken steps to becoming the local leader in pediatric services with the opening of a pediatric pavilion. The pavilion includes a 14-bed intensive care unit, plus a second, 12-bed step-down unit to serve those patients between ICU and general pediatric care.
Accompanying these facility changes is an extensive staff-training program through Methodist Children’s Hospital in San Antonio that will ensure the hospital’s medical personnel have the necessary skills to treat these vulnerable patients.
“It’s a specialty care,” says Rob Heifner, chief operating officer of Rio Grande Regional Hospital. “It’s not just doing the same thing to smaller bodies.”
At the 441-bed McAllen Medical Center, patients have peace of mind knowing they can turn to 400-plus physicians on staff who specialize in more than 50 fields. One of these physicians making recent news is Dr. Ray Fulp, an orthopedic surgeon who recently performed the region’s first cervical disc replacement surgery. The procedure, which employs intervertebral disc prostheses for the cervical spine, restores the function of the spine while also reducing pain.
“This device will revolutionize neck surgery,” Fulp says.
In addition to the ever-increasing list of specialized services and technological advancements being made at the area’s three major medical centers, visitors and patients continue to benefit from physical facilities improvements across the board. DHR opened its new Women’s Hospital at Renaissance in fall 2007; McAllen Medical Center opened its remodeled emergency department in summer 2007 and Rio Grande Regional Medical Center wrapped up a facility-wide renovation in fall 2007.
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Story by Jessica Mozo
Photo by Jesse Knish
