Alameda County Medical Center

Infusion Center Opens at Highland

Alameda County Medical Center will open a new Infusion Center on the Highland campus October 11. The facility, on the first floor of the hospital building, will offer significant advantages for patients, and will help ACMC meet its goals for revenue enhancement and financial stability.

The Infusion Center will serve all types of intravenous therapy, including chemotherapy, antibiotics and blood transfusions. It will serve ACMC patients as well as take referrals from the community clinics of the Alameda Health Consortium.

FeFe Tequame, RN, Nurse Manager of the new unit, explains that up until now, ACMC frequently admits patients to the hospital simply for infusion procedures that require close observation. While some chemotherapy infusions take place in the Hematology/Oncology clinic other chemo infusions, along with antibiotics, Remicaid for rheumatoid arthritis, GI treatments and blood transfusions account for about six occupied hospital beds on any given day. Tequame says: 'A lot of medications that we give as inpatient treatments actually can be done as outpatient. We just haven't had the facility to do it until now.'

Those unnecessary hospital admissions are burdensome for patients and costly to the Medical Center. Last year ACMC spent some $340,000 on inpatient infusions of a single chemotherapy drug, Oxaliplatin. These pharmacy costs are rarely reimbursed, but when the Medical Center provides the same treatment on an outpatient basis, it will be able to bill for the cost of the infusion medications and blood products. The other advantage has to do with bed capacity and patient flow. Tequame remarks:

'Often we have a Remicaid patient in Emergency waiting to be admitted to the hospital, and other patients waiting in the ED as well. Remicaid infusion takes about 3 hours--if all our med-surg beds are full, that's three hours longer that someone else will have to wait.'

Beyond helping with patient flow and the bottom line, the outpatient Infusion Center will expand ACMC's offerings and enhance patient convenience, according to Clinical Pharmacist Specialist Jennifer Strickland, PharmD:

'This will enable us to offer some clinical studies, to make available some new drugs that may not have been available to our patients in the past.'

The Infusion Center will be open weekdays from 8:00am to 6:00pm. Planners hope the eleven-station center will provide as many as 30 infusions per day.

High School Youth Shine in Summer Program

Some educators judge student success by grade point average; others look at test scores. When Ebbin Dotson of the Health Careers Development Institute reviews the intensive five week summer program for Oakland teens at Highland Hospital, he sees one clear measure of success: All 28 youth who completed the program are planning to pursue professional careers in health care.

We had a mix of kids, from the "best of the best," to others that could really benefit from being with those kids, and some of those challenging kids. They all learned from one another. We put them in groups that mix kids from different schools and when you ask them what they want to be, each and every one of them, it's something related to health care.

The summer program was conceived and led by former Alameda County Health Director Carl Lester, and sponsored by Alameda County Medical Center, the Bay Area Consortium for Quality Health Care and Oakland Unified School District, office of School-to-Careers. Participants are entering tenth and eleventh grades at six Oakland high schools. They observed first-hand the work of hospital departments such as the Dental clinic, Women's Services and Physical Therapy; undertook group research projects on public health problems; and organized service learning projects such as an information/wayfinding service on the Highland campus. Lester isn't kidding when he calls it a "vigorous" program: "Sometimes the students didn't have time for lunch, or only 15 minutes. They exceeded by far my expectations."

Former ACMC nursing leader Gloria Williams, who served as the main liaison to hospital departments, says that over the course of five weeks in and around Highland, she saw the youth mature, ask better questions, and learn about group process. Williams thanks the ACMC staff who made the youth feel welcome:

It isn't easy to run a busy hospital department, and these high school students need time and attention, but everybody I worked with was very helpful.

In addition to working in departments and at information booths, the teens heard from numerous local health experts. They then broke into groups to research health topics such as environmental justice and racial/ethnic disparities in health, and presented their findings on August 17. Blanca Marin's group focused on social epidemiology:

We didn't know our subject was that big. We narrowed it down to the social epidemiology of depression. We found that depression can lead to violence; People with HIV/AIDS are more likely to be depressed, and that can lead to suicide. The statistics we found are huge. We learned that 21% of middle school students in Oakland had experienced suicidal thoughts.

Marin herself has a teen-age friend who survived a suicide attempt. Dotson says that, while the youth were new to public health research, they are all too familiar with the kinds of problems they studied:

Every single project, somebody in that group has lived through it and shared the story about it. We've shared wonderful things with one other, sad things, and they stand up and come back day after day- it's great.

In addition to ACMC and the Bay Area Consortium, participating organizations included Oakland Unified School District, UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the Port of Oakland. Funding was provided by Alameda County Public Health Department. Lester is optimistic the program will continue in summers to come.

Medical Educators Honored

Colin Feeney, MD of the Internal Medicine department is a recipient of this year's Kaiser Award for Excellence in Teaching at the University of California, San Francisco. The award 'recognizes special teachers who have inspired, motivated, and gone above and beyond the call of duty to make medical education at UCSF an excellent experience.' Nominees are selected by UCSF students and faculty. The award was established by a gift from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors has approved a resolution naming the surgery floor at Highland Hospital in honor of Claude H. Organ, Jr., MD. Dr. Organ, who passed away in June 2005, was Chairman of Surgery and Program Director of the UC Davis (later UC San Francisco) East Bay Surgery Program from 1988 until his retirement in 2003. In his lengthy and prolific career he earned an outstanding reputation as a surgeon, educator and journal editor, and held numerous leadership positions, including a term as President of the American College of Surgeons.

On June 15 at 5:00pm, ACMC and the Medical Staff will host an informal reception on the fifth floor of Highland's K-Building, celebrating the naming of the Claude H. Organ, Jr., MD Surgical Suites. All are welcome.