An alliance with Johns Hopkins Medicine International is putting this world-class treatment center on the map to offer private hospital services of the highest standards
By Anne-Frances Hutchinson & Produced by Sean Tague
An ambitious coalition of local physicians and business leaders seeking to improve the standard of care for Panama City residents have leveraged a bold partnership with Johns Hopkins Medicine International (JHI) to develop Central America’s first digital hospital. In March of 2006, the 75-bed Hospital Punta Pacífica opened in Panama City, offering a range of services to rival the world’s finest care facilities.
At the heart of this effort is an alliance with the venerable Johns Hopkins Medicine International, first formed in 2001. Under the terms of the original affiliation, JHI offered guidance on a range of critical issues, including hospital management, architectural design, equipment evaluation, and educational services.
In late 2008, Hospital Punta Pacifica entered into a full-scale management agreement with Johns Hopkins, who would take control of the hospital’s day-to-day operations through 2015. JHI tapped William Beach to take Punta Pacifica’s CEO slot. Beach, a longtime Johns Hopkins vet, most recently led a successful JHI affiliation with Anadolu Medical Center in Istanbul, a 204-bed acute care hospital with center of excellence programs in cardiology, oncology, women’s health and neurological sciences.
GLOBAL VISION, LOCAL CARE
Johns Hopkins was seeking to advance their global presence in the region at the same time Panama City physicians and thought leaders were making plans to create a world-class medical facility. “Hopkins was looking to establish something in Central America, so it was a perfect match in concept,” Beach recalls. Strategic planners at Hopkins saw an opportunity to leverage a growing trend towards private healthcare and insured coverage in Panama that accompanied the country’s rising economic status, and supported the founder’s vision to serve the local population as well as people from other areas seeking quality private care.
“The economic development of Panama has driven the need and feasibility of private healthcare,” Beach notes. “Private healthcare tends to raise the bar for healthcare across the whole country. That certainly is the trend here.”
The services available at Punta Pacifica include 24-hour/7-day emergency services, cardiology, neurology, pediatrics, gastroenterology, nephrology and endocrinology, as well as aesthetics and bariatrics.
CARE IN THE DIGITAL AGE
An example of the cutting-edge services and technologies in place at Punta Pacifica can be seen in the hospital’s neonatology practice and 8-bed neonatal intensive care unit.
“The NICU was part of our original planning as we looked at the emerging market here. Because the hospital was built to raise the standard of healthcare, management looked at where they could really make a difference with high-tech care, state-of-the-art care, and what the needs of the market would be in 5 to 10 years,” Beach explains. “They identified women’s health, neonatal, labor and delivery, orthopedic surgery, as well as cardiovascular and neurology as areas that would be a real need in the region in the years to come.”
Building from the ground up presented a technological advantage unique to the region. As the first hospital in Central America to be built entirely in the digital age, Punta Pacifica has an impressive and formidable set of systems and tools to provide the best care from a technological standpoint.
From intelligent operating rooms that enable procedures to be broadcast in real-time to medical teaching facilities around the world, to the latest in diagnostic imaging technologies and virtual medicine, Punta Pacifica is setting a new standard. “Significant effort centered on imaging equipment, which tends to be the thing that is most dramatically affected by having digital capability,” Beach points out.
To effect seamless communications between systems, Punta Pacifica chose a single-vendor approach for medical imaging. “From the beginning we installed all the available imaging modalities, MR, nuclear med, CT – so if you’re going to do that you need to choose a company that has those capabilities.” The same vendor also provided the hospital’s radiology PACS system
QUALITY FIRST
Ranked consistently as one of the best hospitals in the U.S., Johns Hopkins brings their standards of excellence to bear on every affiliation, and Punta Pacifica is no exception. Under the affiliation agreement, staff at Johns Hopkins is spearheading efforts to achieve accreditation by the Joint Commission. Beach and the JHI team previously led Anadolu Medical Center to their successful attainment of Joint Commission International as well as ISO 9001–2000 Quality Management System, ISO 14001 Environment Management System, and OHSAS 18001 Work Health and Safety certification. Beach and his colleagues have set an ambitious goal for accreditation, preparing to invite JCI inspectors by early 2010. “We’re really pushing to stay on that track,” he says. “Certainly by halfway through next year we should have our JCI accreditation visit.”
Punta Pacifica, when accredited, will be the only hospital with that status in the country, although others are now following Punta Pacifica’s lead. “It’s an important step and pushes the bar for everybody in the country. In itself, the certification isn’t what’s most important. It’s a great thing, but it’s more the worthy goal than the actual accreditation document that is most important. Accreditation is a process that we believe in and helps us stay focused on safety and quality.”
Panama’s first-ever Johns Hopkins CME conference, held earlier in the year, drew 550 attendees for two days of interaction with prominent Hopkins physicians. Knowledge transfer is a main focus of the Johns Hopkins mission. “For physicians there’s a real advantage in participating because they learn all the quality techniques we teach, from continuous improvement, to preparing for joint commission,” he notes. “Even if they take it back to their other hospitals where they practice or in their own private practice, it will continue to benefit them even when they’re away from the hospital.”
Johns Hopkins requires every physician who practices in their system to be certified by their own internal quality credentialing process. Panamanian physicians are not required by their national regulatory bodies to attain this level of certification, and while it has been a hurdle, local physicians are now seeing the benefits of the JHI medical education component.
“Now these physicians really understand and they see the advantages of going through the process in being part of our credentialed staff and being on the kind of committees and projects and things that they might in a hospital -- a first-class hospital -- anywhere in the world,” Beach says.
FACTS AT A GLANCE:
Company Name: Hospital Punta Pacífica
Operations: Hospital Punta Pacifica is a 75-bed hospital managed by Johns Hopkins Medicine International.
Established: 2006
Employees: 400
Revenue: US$30 million
www.hospitalpuntapacifica.com
View Digital Corporate Profile of HospitalPunta in Healthcare Digital December 2009