Racing to catch up with its rivals, Northwestern Memorial Hospital has plucked a well-known Cleveland Clinic heart surgeon to help it strengthen and expand its cardiac services.
The price tag for cardiac expansion, which will also include new facilities, is expected initially to reach into the tens of millions of dollars, Northwestern executives confirmed. But leaders of the downtown academic medical center also know there is money to be made.
Cardiac care is perhaps the most competitive arena for hospitals. It is also one of the most lucrative services, with heart surgeries and procedures accounting for at least 20 percent of a typical facility’s revenue and up to 50 percent of its profit, hospitals have reported.
Chicago-area native Dr. Patrick McCarthy, 48, will leave the noted Cleveland Clinic to join Northwestern Memorial in April to head its division of cardiac surgery and co-direct the hospital’s Northwestern Memorial Heart Institute–the new name being given to the hospital’s cardiology, vascular and heart surgery programs.
Although Northwestern Memorial is well known in several areas of care and research, executives admit they have work to do before becoming as nationally known in heart care. Northwestern performs about 400 open-heart surgeries annually, which is well behind several Chicago-area rivals.
University of Chicago Hospitals and Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood have better known and busier heart programs, Northwestern admits.
Both Loyola and the U. of C. perform more than 600 heart surgeries a year and also do heart transplants–something Northwestern stopped doing four years ago.
Several hospitals in the suburbs and in southern Illinois, too, have larger heart surgery volumes than Northwestern. Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn leads the state, performing more than 1,100 heart surgeries a year.
But Northwestern has lofty goals. McCarthy said Northwestern will initially double its number of heart surgeons to four by the end of this year and hopes to eventually “double or triple” the hospital’s number of heart surgeries in the next five years.
Northwestern also plans to recruit 8 to 10 more cardiologists, adding to its current staff of about 60, said Dr. Robert Bonow, the hospital’s cardiology chief, who will be the new institute’s other co-director.
Furthermore, Northwestern is not ruling out restarting its heart transplant program, which the facility ended in 2000 due to lack of patient volume.
“We will build all of the infrastructure that we need,” said McCarthy, a native of south suburban Evergreen Park who is the surgical director of the Kaufman Center for Heart Failure at the Cleveland Clinic.
“The leadership at Northwestern Memorial has the will and the resources to put together a world class program that will be different from anything that Chicago currently offers,” he said.
Northwestern executives say they are not going after competitors’ patients as much as they are trying to become a resource for care not now available.
“We see the opportunity to bring a world class program to the marketplace,” said Northwestern Memorial Chief Executive Officer Dean Harrison.
McCarthy’s expertise in valve disease and minimally invasive techniques may keep patients in Chicago for treatment when they have had to travel elsewhere in the past, the hospital said.
“He really has become one of the world’s experts in treating people with weak hearts,” Bonow said.
For now, Northwestern has capacity for all of its surgeries, the hospital’s surgery chief, Dr. Richard Bell, said, because of plans to open 10 new operating rooms this spring. Northwestern Memorial currently has 32 operating rooms.
But executives admit additional surgical capacity will likely be needed in the future for open-heart surgery cases, and they are not ruling out a separate home for cardiac care.
Northwestern, which built its new hospital just five years ago, is looking near its downtown campus for 250 additional medical and surgical beds to meet all of its future space needs. Heart surgery could remain at existing hospital facilities or relocate to a new building, according to several scenarios executives are discussing.
