Moving Forward

News

 

 

Crawford Long Plans $270 Million Revamp
Common Thread
Medical School Rises in Ranks
Top Grades
Major Boost for Parkinson's Research
Balloons in the Brain
Noise Busters
Take Heart in Mountains
Cure for Sickle Cell?

Crawford Long Plans $270 Million Revamp

Natural light. Lush greenery. Fountains. Public spaces organized around a glass-enclosed conservatory. Ample parking. Convenient services geared to customers.

A shopping mall? No, it's the latest approach to creating pleasant and functional environments for patients, visitors, and the people who work in hospitals and outpatient settings. And it's the overriding theme behind the plan recently announced with Cousins Properties' health care division to redevelop Emory's 90-year-old Crawford Long Hospital (CLH) complex in midtown Atlanta. The new, pedestrian-friendly design will make the hospital and medical offices more convenient for patients and provide more flexible space for staff and physicians.

The five city blocks that are home to CLH will get a major facelift over the next three years, as the aging hospital retools to better meet the booming resurgence of the city and the needs of its citizens. The centerpiece of the $270 million redevelopment will be a 500,000-square-foot, six-story diagnostic and treatment center topped with a 16-story medical office building. Outpatient services now located on three different blocks will be consolidated into one building, so patients and visitors will no longer have to access services through a maze of hallways and tunnels. Departments located in the diagnostic and treatment center will include emergency medicine, imaging, endoscopy, and radiology on the second level; admitting, preadmission, testing, and the Carlyle Fraser Heart Center on the third level; surgical and pulmonary services on the fourth level; food services, dining room, education, labs, and medical engineering on the fifth level; and the women's center on the sixth level. The flexible design also accommodates current and future advanced medical technology.

Besides providing more parking, the redevelopment project complements the vision of Central Atlanta Progress and the Midtown Alliance. Plans include sidewalks, outdoor lighting, street-level retail, open spaces, and park-like settings.

The massive development - one of the largest hospital construction projects ever in Georgia - also aligns with Emory's strategic plan to be the pre-eminent health care system in Atlanta, says Emory Hospitals CEO John Henry.

Emory expects to apply to the State Health Planning Agency in May for a Certificate of Need, which Crawford Long needs before construction can start this fall.

The office building will open during the fourth quarter of 2001 and the medical facility about a year later. By the end of the project, a number of structures on the CLH campus will have been demolished - the Woodruff Building, the School of Nursing Building, Candler buildings B and C, the Glenn Building, two parking decks, and several small storage buildings, says COO Al Blackwelder. In addition, the hospital has petitioned the city to close Prescott Street. No disruption in hospital or outpatient care is expected during construction.

As metro Atlanta's third largest hospital, Crawford Long will retain its current number of licensed beds (583). More than 1,000 physicians and 2,000 employees serve 100,000 outpatients and inpatients annually at the Crawford Long complex bounded by Peachtree, West Peachtree, Pine, and Linden Avenue.


Common Thread



 

You've gotta have heart," goes the old refrain. And vessels too, say representatives from vascular surgery, interventional cardiology, interventional neuroradiology, neurovascular surgery, and interventional radiology. After meeting for months, the specialists from those areas have created the Emory Heart and Vascular Center. Its goal is to foster a comprehensive team approach to helping cardiac and vascular patients make decisions about appropriate medications, surgery, angioplasty, or lifestyle changes.

"Medical professionals tend to compartmentalize disorders according to our own areas of expertise," says Alan Lumsden, director of vascular surgery. "But the vascular system is the thread that runs through the body and is best treated by a team of professionals knowledgeable about all the various aspects of that vasculature."

The center facilitates patient transfer into Emory Healthcare and is staffed around the clock by registered nurses and operators. Patients and referring physicians can reach the center by calling 404-778-4930 or 1-800-43HEART.


Medical School Rises in Ranks

Emory's School of Medicine climbed six places last year to number 24 in the nation in National Institutes of Health awards to medical schools. Emory received $79,912,166 in NIH money: 296 research grants and 13 training grants, 31 fellowships, 2 R&D contracts, and one other award.

Emory medical school's dean of research, Robert Rich, calculated the growth rates of NIH funding from FY97 to FY98 for the top 30 medical schools and says Emory tops the list at a 22.7% increase.

Some of the individual departments at Emory rose in the rankings even more than the medical school as a whole. For example, microbiology and immunology rose from 18th in 1997 to 5th in 1998. Nine other Emory medical school departments now rank in the top 20 nationally in terms of NIH dollars received: rehabilitation medicine (4th), dermatology (5th), neurology (6th), ophthalmology (8th), family medicine (9th), radiology (16th), biochemistry (17th), pharmacology (19th), and pathology (20th).

In other measures, the medical school ranks 20th in the nation in terms of federal research dollars in general. And the medical school moved up to 19th place (from 21st last year) in U.S. News and World Report's 2000 "America's Best Graduate Schools" guide.


Top Grades

Allied Health's physician assistant program continues to bring honors to the medical school and Woodruff Health Sciences Center. The PA program was ranked second in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. And many believe the program's reputation hasn't caught up with the reality.

Now more kudos: The class of 1998 achieved a 100% pass rate on the PA national board exam and claimed the number one spot among PA programs in the nation by achieving the highest class average (by five points) compared with all other PA programs. This is the second time in three years that Emory's PA students had the highest average score on the boards.

Also to be congratulated are the 1998 graduates of the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, who performed extremely well on the national licensing exam last year with a 96% pass rate. Well done!


Major Boost for Parkinson's Research



More than a million Americans with Parkinson's disease can be encouraged that scientists will make substantial progress over the next few years in unraveling the causes and finding new ways to diagnose and treat this movement disorder. Thanks to some added muscle from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), Emory continues to be at the forefront of that effort as one of three top universities - along with Harvard (Massachusetts General Hospital) and Johns Hopkins - recently awarded $7.5 million each for five years and named a Parkinson's Disease Research Center of Excellence. At Emory, the research team will be led by Mahlon DeLong, neurology chair. The center will provide state-of-the-art research and multidisciplinary training for young scientists to research PD and related disorders.

Over the past decade, scientists have made remarkable progress in understanding the basis of Parkson's and in treating it. For instance, there's been a renaissance in surgical interventions for the chronic, progressive neurodegenerative disorder, in part due to studies by DeLong and his colleagues. Pallidotomy, abandoned in the 1950s, now has been refined to become a widely accepted procedure for advanced, medically intractable Parkinson's. At Emory alone, the procedure has helped more than 300 patients. More recently, early trials here of a less invasive and more easily controlled treatment - chronic, high frequency (deep brain) stimulation - have helped restore movement to dozens of other patients.

The new Emory Parkinson's research center focuses on five therapeutic goals, with each subproject headed by a key faculty member: developing a better animal model of Parkinson's disease (Timothy Greenamyre), testing proposed physiologic mechanisms underlying Parkinson's (Scott Grafton), determining the mechanism of action of deep brain stimulation (Jerry Vitek), elucidating the therapeutic and potentially neuroprotective effects of stimulation (Thomas Wichmann), and developing better drug therapies (Jeff Conn). Besides neurology, research is carried out in many departments and centers at Emory, including pharmacology, cell biology, nuclear medicine, Yerkes Primate Center, and the PET Center.


Balloons in the Brain

Emory scientists continue to lead the way in using balloons and stents to open clogged arteries during minimally invasive procedures. An Emory team of interventional neuroradiologists headed by Gregory Joseph and Jacques Dion is one of the few in the country performing intracranial angioplasty, and has completed 20 such procedures at Emory University Hospital.

In March, the team went a step further. They implanted a tiny stainless steel mesh coil stent to prop open the artery of a 65-year-old schoolteacher after angioplasty. She was one of the first in the country to undergo this advanced treatment to prevent debilitating strokes.

The patient had experienced ministrokes associated with clogged arteries in the brain. Using x-ray for guidance, a tiny balloon was inserted into the basilar artery and threaded to the occluded site in the brain, where it was inflated, compressing the plaque and opening the vessel. Because the vessel would not stay open, the team then placed the stent at the site of blockage where it will eventually become part of the vessel wall. The patient has had no stroke symptoms since undergoing the procedure.

The interventional neuroradiology team at Emory Hospital has led the way in such breakthroughs in treating acute stroke over the past five years, much in the same pioneering tradition that has distinguished other Emory physician scientists. More than 20 years ago, Emory cardiologist Andreas Gruntzig pioneered percutaneous coronary transluminal angioplasty here. The first coronary stent implantation in the United States was performed in 1987 by Spencer King, director of interventional cardiology at Emory's School of Medicine.


Noise Busters

What did Beethoven, Martin Luther, and Francis Bacon have in common?

Tinnitus or ringing in the ears.

And up until now there wasn't much anyone could do about it. In fact, tinnitus causes significant suffering, including depression and severe sleep deprivation, for up to 5% of the general population (12 million people), says Pawel Jastreboff, director of Emory's new Tinnitus and Hyperacusis Center. Usually, there's no explanation for the incessant noise.

Thanks to Jastreboff, the world authority in the field, a treatment known as tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT) provides relief for about 80% of patients. TRT retrains their brains so that they react to tinnitus the same way they block out other noises, such as the sound of a kitchen refrigerator.

During TRT, many patients use two inconspicuous, small sound generators either in or behind the ear. The devices do not compete with hearing, and patients can talk or use the phone without any interference. The result is not a cure, but relief for tinnitus in the majority of cases. Retraining takes about a year and a half; relapse is rare.

Jastreboff uses modified TRT to treat hyperacusis, a hypersensitivity or even painful response to sound that accompanies tinnitus 40% of the time. In severe cases, hyperacusis can prevent people from caring for their children or even holding jobs. For more information, call the Tinnitus and Hyperacusis Center at 404-778-3109 or visit www.tinnitus-pjj.com.


Take Heart in Mountains



 

Hiawassee in Townes County is a popular tourist destination known for majestic mountains, Lake Chatuge, and now for its Emory-affiliated Heart and Vascular Center, which opened in February.

The 1600-square-foot facility in Chatuge Regional Hospital - a collaborative effort of Emory Healthcare, Cardiac Disease Specialists PC, and the hospital - will provide area residents with access to the latest in diagnostic cardiac treatment and technology, says Doug Morris, director of the Emory Heart and Vascular Center in Atlanta. Even though the Hiawassee center is more than 100 miles away from Atlanta, "Emory can offer a broad range of cardiac expertise to the entire Southeast and circumvent the distance via on-line technology."

Test results from the center's imaging equipment are immediately transferred via phone line to Emory Hospital in Atlanta and read by a team of nuclear cardiologists. Other services include cardiac consultation, treadmill testing, and echocardiograms.


Cure for Sickle Cell?

The jury is still out, but Keone Penn for now has triumphed over the chronic pain, strokes, and complications that plagued the first 12 years of his life. Emory physicians performed the world's first unrelated umbilical cord blood transplant for high-risk sickle cell anemia late last year, and there's a 50-50 chance the procedure may cure him.
In this Issue


From the Director  /  Letters

Emory & Columbia/HCA Open New Doors

Q & A with Columbia/HCA

EHCA at a Glance  /  Map

Emory's Newest Chessman

Global Attack on AIDS

Taking Stock

Moving Forward  /  Noteworthy

Drug trials. Who needs them?

Reaching Out to Nicaragua

Besides the stroke that partially paralyzed him at age five, Keone was hospitalized seven times in 1998 alone with seizures and numerous infections. He needed monthly transfusions to reduce his chances of having a second stroke and had trouble tolerating the medications.

"Unrelated umbilical cord blood transplantation was a reasonable option for a patient like Keone for whom a related or unrelated bone marrow donor does not exist," says Andrew Yeager, principal investigator of the clinical trial in which Keone volunteered to pioneer.

Umbilical cord blood is a promising new source of stem cells, the blood factories within the body. Stem cells from the placenta and umbilical cord that would normally be discarded after birth are collected with the consent of the mother and kept frozen until they are transplanted through intravenous injection into the patient.

"Within six months, we should know whether the cord blood enabled Keone's body to build a normal blood cell factory and replace the one that made sickled red blood cells," says Yeager.

Extensive international research, including studies at Emory and Egleston Children's Hospital, show great promise for cord blood transplants. In over 100 cases, bone marrow transplants from healthy siblings have cured children with high-risk sickle cell anemia. Umbilical cord blood cell transplants from siblings or unrelated donors have cured other blood diseases and leukemia in children.

 


Copyright © Emory University, 1999. All Rights Reserved.
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Web version by Jaime Henriquez.