Doctor for a Day
Operating Procedure: Matlock gets a close-up of a complicated Whipple surgery, which typically takes about six hours, in one of EUH's twenty-two operating rooms. Surgeon Juan Sarmiento, associate professor of surgery at the School of Medicine and director of hepatopancreatic biliary surgery for EUH, explains the procedure over his trademark upbeat music. Because confidentiality is paramount, all patients who might encounter the guest doctors consent beforehand.
Suiting Up: Dawnmarie Matlock pulls on her white coat, which has her name on it and is the longer length that identifies attending physicians at EUH; medical students wear shorter coats.
Overhead in Post-Op: Matlock and Lynda Smith 86MBA (right), the Emory Alumni Board liaison to Emory Healthcare, listen as Nurse Maquitha Mitchell describes pre-op and post-op procedures. More than four hundred organ transplants each year are performed at EUH. A few feet away, a nurse tells a patient, "You're waking up from your surgery. It's quarter to eleven in the morning. You've got your new kidney."
911 Call: Matlock and other "docs" listen as Matt Keadey, medical director for the Emergency Department, describes the much-needed expansion and renovation planned for the ER. The EUH emergency room sees an average of one hundred patients a day and admits about thirty-five of those for further treatment. Peak hours in the ER are ten a.m. to three a.m., Keadey said, and the busiest day is-unquestionably-Monday. EUH has 550 patient beds total.
Family Focus: The hospital's newest Neurointensive Care Unit receives more hemorrhagic stroke patients than any other hospital in the Southeast. Showers, laundry facilities, and refrigerators are available for family members of patients. The guest doctors finished their day in the eight-bed hospice unit with Palliative Care Center Director Tammie Quest, one of the country's leading advocates for providing comprehensive, compassionate palliative care to both patients and their families. "I will never tell you there is nothing else we can do," she said.
Culture Shift: The "docs" heard from John Fox (left), president and CEO of Emory Healthcare, and Robert Bachman, CEO of Emory University Hospital. The University HealthSystem Consortium recently ranked EUH/Emory University Orthopaedics & Spine Hospital second and Emory University Hospital Midtown sixth in its 2012 rankings for quality and safety-the first time two hospitals from the same system made the top ten. "Seven years ago, this hospital was number seventy-two," Bachman said. "We made a decision that culture trumps strategy. That now guides everything we do."
Crossing the Line: Appropriately attired, Matlock and Smith cross the red line into a sterile environment to observe an open-heart surgery-a procedure that has become more rare as less invasive, high-tech heart treatments, such as cardiac catheterization, have improved. As a former nurse, Matlock says she was most impressed with the sweeping advances in technology found in virtually every area of the hospital. "That's the biggest change," she said. "It's just phenomenal."
Tools of the Trade: One of Matlock's stops at Emory University Hospital was sterile processing, where thousands of medical instruments a day descend in a special elevator to be made new again in a high-tech dishwasher that heats water to some 150 degrees. Clean instruments are packed into sealed trays, which are tracked electronically, and returned to the appropriately marked aisle-spine, ortho, neuro—to await their next assignment. Each day at 4:30 p.m., a giant printer rolls out the next day's surgery schedule, and staff technicians build all the case carts accordingly.
Every year, more than fifty-five thousand patients pass through Emory University Hospital (EUH) and Emory University Hospital Midtown for treatment—but the vast majority encounters only a tiny corner of the health care enterprise. Development Office leaders recently launched an elite program designed to give small groups a bigger understanding of the scope of activity, expertise, and care offered at the not-for-profit academic hospital. These “Doctors for a Day” don’t just tour the hallways—they don scrubs, observe surgeries, meet physicians of all sorts, and go behind the scenes in labs and the ER. Last fall, Emory Magazine shadowed Dawnmarie Matlock 91L, a partner in the health care practice of law firm Alston and Bird who recently joined the Emory Healthcare Advisory Board, on an eye-opening adventure through the heart of a hospital.
