1996 Annual Report
Year in Review
Entering the Home Stretch...
Approvals and praise--and dealing with thousands of details--marked 1996 for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation's $100 million plus new campus on El Camino Real.
With its overall approval in January, 1996, the Palo Alto City Council ended nearly a decade of efforts by PAMF to find a way to modernize, streamline and modestly expand its facilities. The approval also triggered a yearlong program by the Foundation, city officials and others to meet 141 conditions, almost all of them technical in nature, that needed to be resolved prior to getting final sign off for the beginning of construction, early in 1997.
A major ground breaking ceremony, televised community wide via satellite, was held on April 1, 1997, and actual excavation of the site began April 15.
Days before the ground breaking, the Capital Campaign reached its $30 million phase one goal in philanthropic gifts, which will be used to help build the new campus. Local philanthropy will account for at least $40 million of the project.
Throughout 1996, hundreds of PAMF physicians and staff members were engaged in department by department planning to determine how they can best function within the new campus. PAMF built a full scale mockup of a department layout in the new building, and Jenifer Turnbull, Manager of Business Planning and Development, conducted numerous tours of the mockup to help fine tune the design to meet specific departmental needs.
Triggered by city approval of the new campus, PAMF received a special "editorial endorsement" from the San Francisco Chronicle in July, 1996. The editorial entitled "A Prototype for Health Care"said PAMF is "a special place, where community service is as much a part of the mission as cutting edge research." It added: "In both equipment and staff the clinic is the envy of much of the profession."
PAMF also held its seventh biennial national symposium on health policy and economics in March, 1996, entitled, "Out of the Ashes: Can the Private Sector Save Health Care?" It featured speakers and panelists from across the nation and was attended by nearly 600 health care leaders from throughout the United States and several other nations.
Health Care Division
The Health Care Division had two specific reasons for special pride in 1996:
PAMF received a maximum three year accreditation by The Medical Quality Commission (TMQC) of the Unified Medical Group Association in June, 1996 makingg PAMF the second outpatient clinic in Northern California to receive TMQC accreditation. Notable was that of 142 areas inspected by the accreditation team, 131 received perfect scores, with the age of the facilities contributing to the few less than perfect scores.
"We believe we are the only clinic in the nation to receive maximum accreditations from both major accreditation organizations," Chief Operating Officer David Druker, M.D., reported to Trustees referring to an earlier full accreditation, 'in late 1995, by the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care. Cheryl Kilsdonk played a major role in both accreditations.
Results of the annual Patient Satisfaction Survey for 1996 showed higher than ever levels of satisfaction with the quality of care and warmth and friendliness of PAMF physicians and staff. This is the result of "trying to define quality from the patient's perspective," involving hundreds of persons throughout the organization, Diane Stewart, Director of Quality Management and Strategic Planning, said.
Other important highlights of 1996 include:
Selection of Epic Systems Corporation, based in Madison, Wisconsin, as the vendor to provide an "electronic medical record" (EMR) for PAMF. PAMF is one of two pilot sites for development of the EMR system within the Sutter Health system. When implemented beginning in 1998, the EMR will replace the inefficient paper "medical chart" and improve both health care and security of data, Michael Trollope, M.D., head of the PAMF Clinical Computing Committee, said.
Expansion of a "Personal Health Improvement Program" designed to help patients who are experiencing symptoms of stress and other difficult to diagnose conditions. "People have raved about it. and many of them called it 'essential' to their lives," said Laurel Trujillo, M.D., who helped implement the six weekk program, working with the Education Division.
Research Institute
PAMF's Research Institute continued its respected scientific work in areas of human immunology, cardiovascular dynamics and cholesterol metabolism. Scientists and staff began planning for their move into the research building on the new campus.
Institute Director Allen D. Cooper. M.D., cited two major developments: (1) "We are approaching a decade when the Institute's senior scientists will be turning over their important work to a new generation of scientists," and (2) there is a basic worldwide trend toward genetic and molecular research requiring increasingly sophisticated computer and other research tools.
The Institute also supervised "clinical research" studies relating to patient care and medications. Most studies are conducted within the Health Care Division in collaboration with pharmaceutical firms.
A Second 'New Campus'
The Fremont Center PAMF's satellite clinic in the East Bay is planning a "new campus" of its own, but on a much smaller scale than the main Palo Alto campus on El Camino Real. Both are targeted for completion in late 1998.
The Fremont Center will have a new 58,500square foott building that will occupy a comer of a large lot at Stevenson Boulevard and Paseo Padre Parkway in the heart of Fremont-adjacent to the Civic Center and less than a block from the present Center.
Space is being reserved for a possible addition of 41,500 square feet if the Center continues its pattern of robust growth of recent years, when it has averaged about 15% per year.
The Center, which opened in 1984, reached 23 physicians plus approximately 98 support staff by 1996 in response to community demand. The new building will provide capacity for up to 30 additional physicians plus staff.
It will also enable all offices and services to be in a single building rather than split between two buildings (with a parking lot between) as they are now.
The new building will allow the addition of numerous specialty care and support services to improve patient access significantly, according to David Hooper, M.D., Division Head for Satellite Operations. New services to be added include ultrasound, ophthalmology, optometry and general surgery. Part time specialty services of orthopedics and podiatry will expand to full time and allergy care will expand.
Existing services in family practice, internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics/gynecology and psychiatry/social work also will expand to meet community demand, and a "Family Health Resource Center" will be created similar to one being planned for the main campus.
In 1996, scores of physicians, staff and administrators went through a "visioning process" to help determine what would make an optimum building for patients.
"We want it to be an environment for health and healing," with maximum natural light and a "human scale design, so the waiting rooms feel more like living rooms," Dr. Hooper says.
Education Division
The Education Division under the direction of Janet Lederer, PAMF Vice President for Education made significant advances in increasing its community outreach programs and services during 1996. In addition to its health and wellness programs, the Division:
Sponsored or cosponsored several major community conferences in areas such as women's health, the wellbeing of adolescent girls, redefining aging and specific diseases or conditions.
Successfully expanded the Women's Health Resource Center, off the main Clinic lobby in Palo Alto. The Center helped more than 3,000 persons (7% of them men) find specific health in 1996 and topped 5,000 in the first few months of 1997. With the opening of the new campus, the Center will be expanded to become a resource center for everyone and renamed to reflect its broader focus, while retaining a major section on women's health.
Became an active collaborator with several other community organizations in designing specific programs to address locally the national issue of the loss of self worth among adolescent girls with attention for problems of boys, too. The efforts were spurred by a talk in January, 1996, by author Mary Pipher cosponsored by PAMF. Education Coordinator Becky Beacom of PAMF continues to work on adolescent programs.
Spearheaded development of an innovative, computer assisted, individualized Health Risk Appraisal tool that is a pilot for a larger health assessment program working closely with physicians and staff from the Health Care Division.
The Education Division also is looking forward to the opening of the new campus because of enhanced conferencing and classroom facilities: a modem, 300 person capacity auditorium that can be quickly partititioned into six large multiple use rooms for classes, meetings, support groups and other uses. In addition, the Division is already planning how to use educational spaces in each major clinical area of the Health Care Division, where patients can easily access informational and health promotion materials.