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Joint Venture Results in New Outpatient Neurosurgical Care at St. Vincent's

BY MARTI WEBB SLAY

A collaboration between two different neurosurgery groups and St. Vincent’s has led to the opening of a new neurosurgical outpatient center which is housed in the hospital’s new North Tower.

“St. Vincent’s Neurosurgical Center is a first for Alabama and one of few such facilities throughout the country, dedicated to the provision of outpatient neurosurgical and interventional pain procedures,” says Scott Goggins of St. Vincent’s. “This unique focus, coupled with the compassion and competency of the professional staff in the Center, should lead to an outstanding patient experience.”

Several local neurosurgeons began discussing the idea a couple of years ago when they heard of a similar venture in Nashville. Benjamin B. Fulmer, MD, a neurosurgeon with Birmingham Neurosurgery and Spine Group, says they were impressed with the efficiency of the Nashville center, and they felt it would take two different groups working together to have enough cases to make the project work. Colleagues with Neurosurgical Associates were interested, and they began to search for a hospital that would work with them.

St. Vincent’s was open to the idea from the start. “They were very clearly interested early on and very enthusiastic about seeing if we could make it work,” says Fulmer.

The Center, which opened on September 13, will enable the physicians to take “a streamlined approach to doing a few select cases,” Fulmer explains. While most of their surgeries will still be performed at the hospital, surgeries that will primarily be done at the new center include lumbar and cervical discectomies and peripheral nerve procedures such as carpal tunnel and other nerve releases. Interventional pain procedures will also be performed at the outpatient center.

“The instrumentation is very standardized, and it’s very efficient to have everything packaged in one tray. We have really fast turnover time. Turnover times in hospitals are just slow. They take an hour to turn over a room from one case to the next. We feel like we can do it in minutes … get the room clean and fixed right back up for another case,” says Fulmer.

As the idea took shape, Salient Health Ventures in Cullman stepped in to help make that idea a reality. “We’re focused on hospital/ physician joint ventures and we help provide a third party focus and objectivity to situations like this,” explains Jesse (Jay) O. Weatherly, III, FACHE, co-founder. “Our focus is on making a particular clinical service a reality, and to make sure that it comes together effectively and operates well.

“We did our job and we feel like we did it well,” he continues, “but for those guys to have agreed on the front end to do this, that’s the big deal. And for it to actually happen is even bigger than that. My hat’s off to them for thinking differently and for pursuing something unique.

“It is a rare thing for a group of surgeons in various groups to come together and do something as significant and as focused as this. To me, that’s the inherent benefit of the St. Vincent’s Neurosurgical Center, to know that your patients are being taken care of in that sort of dedicated environment. There’s not a lot else to say. That is the inherent benefit; it begins and ends with that.”

This article taken from the October 2005 issue of the Birmingham Medical News.

© 2005 Salient Health Services, Inc. All rights reserved.