South Sacramento Medical Center and Roseville Medical Center have been named 2011 Leapfrog Top Hospitals, an honor that rewards hospitals for outstanding success in such areas as using electronic health records to reduce medication and other errors, lowering infection rates, maintaining appropriate physician and nursing staffing, and other measures of safety and efficiency. A total of 10 Kaiser Permanente hospitals in Northern California, and eight in Southern California, received the honor Tuesday, which means that 18 of this year’s 65 Top Hospitals in the U.S. are Kaiser Permanente facilities in California. They were chosen from a field of nearly 1,200 hospitals around the country surve

When Rosie Carollo was hospitalized at the Sutter Children’s Center, Sacramento due to a rare form of childhood epilepsy at just 6 months old, she took great delight in the toys, movies and activities in the hospital’s Child Life Program. After Rosie’s passing in 2004, just shy of her second birthday, her parents, Nicole and George Carollo, were determined to keep her memory alive by giving back to the Sutter Children’s Center – a children’s hospital located inside Sutter Memorial Hospital in East Sacramento – after they provided such great care for their young daughter. “Rosie was our first child and the light of our lives,” said Nicole Carollo. “When she passed I was almost desperate t

When Jim Ferry (an East Sacramento resident) contacted his neighbors to address the impacts of Mercy Hospital using J Street as their primary loading dock, he got a lot of supportive response. The neighborhood is stressed by Mercy's inconsideration. Mr. Ferry has done an admirable job of documenting a fairly shocking misuse of the public way for a loading dock through his blog at http://mercygeneral.blogspot.com. More than any petition, Mr. Ferry's blog uses photos to show the truth. A picture truly is worth a thousand words. The loading situation on J Street is patently hazardous. There are frequently semi-tractor trucks parked in a seven foot wide space that impinge upon the west-bo

CARES (the Center for AIDS Research, Education & Services) is across the street from the Townhouse, which is quiet at 4:00pm on a Monday afternoon long before they open up for Open-Mic night. I walk there after my obligatory after-work nap, still a little groggy, stopping at Old Soul for a mocha to keep my hands warm and bumping into customers who find it strange to see me on the other side of the counter. Mocha in hand, I’m heading across Midtown through the alleyways and wondering if the sun-turned-overcast sky is going to turn to rain, which would put a damper on the bonfire plans I’ve set in motion for later in the day. Over at 21st, I make a right and tell a homeless man I’ll help him

Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento became the first hospital in the greater region to open a Hybrid Surgical Suite – a cardiovascular catheterization lab with immediate surgical capabilities designed to enable cardiologists and cardiovascular surgeons to work side by side – and the first to have a cardiology hospitalist program, providing in-hospital coverage by fully trained, board-certified cardiologists 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The goal of the new cardiology hospitalist program is to improve the quality of care in the cardiology division at Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento, assist with lowering the overall length of stay for patients and, overall, to maintain the cardiac prog

SACRAMENTO – Mayor Kevin Johnson insists Sacramento’s popular Second Saturday art walk is alive and well, and this month includes a different kind of gallery to tour: a medical building. “For anyone who thinks Second Saturday is dead, it’s not,” the mayor said during a press conference Tuesday for the grand opening of the Sutter Capitol Pavilion at 2725 Capitol Ave. “Sutter is opening up its new medical facility to the public for Second Saturday in order to showcase its art installation and the local artists who created the pieces.” The public open house is billed as “Art & Medicine” and will feature tours of the artwork installed throughout the medical office building and outpatient ser

The Health IT market is consolidating. E-Clinical Data Management demands all but force R&D, as well as post-market prescription and OTC product surveillance, into digital domains. Robust database applications are needed to support these applications and systems. Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP are the three dominant players in the space. Oracle has been on a steady acquisition spree for some time and has just strengthened its position further. The Oracle Health Sciences (OHS) unit, created in 2008, acquired safety and pharmacovigilance specialist Relsys (makers of Argus Safety) in April 2009. Past Oracle acquisitions of Siebel Systems (Siebel Clinical CTMS - Clinical Trial Management System)

Later this month the next milestone in the expansion of the Sutter Medical Center in midtown will be the switchover from the existing Energy Center off of 29th Street to the new Energy Center in the basement of Sutter Capitol Pavilion on 28th Street. Demolition of the existing Energy Center is slated to begin later that month with steel expected to rise up for the Anderson Lucchetti Center site later this year

                                                                 Sutter Capitol Pavilion The Sutter Capitol Pavilion includes more than 200,000 square feet of new space for physician offices, procedure rooms and ancillary services. The artistically designed and inviting new four-story medical building will be home to 40 specialists’ offices and 128 exam and procedure rooms. In keeping with the goal of delivering excellent care and improved patient convenience and satisfaction, the building also features cardiac rehabilitation and a new all-digital imaging center. Other highlights of this project are a vascular laboratory, and leading outpatient services, including an ambulatory surgery c

Suddenly, it was over. I spent 27 years in private practice of general internal medicine in Sacramento, seeing patients in the office and in the hospital. I admitted them to the hospital directly from my office or met them in the emergency room. If they were having a complex surgery, I’d help monitor them before and after the operation. Then my local community hospital hired hospitalists. Hospitalists are physicians, whose practice is devoted to treating patients in a hospital setting. There was a brief period of co-existence, but soon the other members of my call-group decided to let the hospitalists assume care of their inpatients. Soon, no one wanted to share call for hospital care. Th

Hours before Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was forcefully exiled to Costa Rica on June 27, he met with seven delegates from Sacramento. The seven were: Bill Camp, executive secretary for the Sacramento Central Labor Council (SCLC); Bud McKinney, a sheet mill worker; Chris Bender, a union representative; Greg Larkins, president of IBW Local 340 and a political organizer for the SCLC; Arturo Aleman, a consultant, Kate Allen, a graduate student at UCLA and summer intern for the SCLC and Dion Archuleta, a canner at Campbell Soup in South Sacramento. The following is an account of their experiences in Honduras over a three-day period in which an alleged coup d’état took place. Background