UC San Diego Health has had big plans for its “East Campus Medical Center” since it purchased the College Area facility previously called Alvarado Hospital Medical Center late last year. Leaders gathered Friday to celebrate months of work spent integrating the facility’s operations into the university’s larger network of care and to point out areas where they expect new offerings to be available to the surrounding community.
Dr. Christian Tomaszewski, the hospital’s chief medical officer, said that a key element is integrating East Campus into the university’s electronic medical records system. While he said that the monthslong effort is not quite complete, it is now far enough along to facilitate transfers to and from other UC San Diego hospitals in La Jolla and Hillcrest.
“That unification now means that we can share all of that information across all of our campuses,” Tomaszewski said.
The area where this capability has already come into play during day-to-day operations, he added, is in the treatment of stroke patients. Since UC San Diego took over, he said, the hospital has added stroke receiving capabilities, meaning that the emergency medical system will bring patients directly to Alvarado. But some, he added, will be transferred to Jacobs Medical Center in La Jolla if they need surgery to remove a brain clot that caused a stroke.
East Campus is a big part of the university health system’s attempt to unclog its two main emergency departments, which have recently seen such demand that it has often been necessary to treat patients in hallways and even a conference room at Jacobs.
The idea is to handle more routine cases at community hospitals closer to where residents live. Officials said that commonly performed procedures in heart health, joint replacement and digestive care are all being bolstered at East Campus. There should be no reason, said Patricia Maysent, UC San Diego Health’s chief executive officer, why residents along Interstate 8 can’t start at East Campus.
“About 20 percent of the patients we serve today come from this community,” Maysent said.
Carrie Meyers, a Del Cerro resident invited to Friday’s event, said her husband recently decided to visit the hospital’s emergency department when he experienced a persistent fever and saw online that wait times were lower than other hospitals nearby.
“It’s a pretty tight community feeling here, and I would say that otherwise we would have left the community to get the care we needed,” Meyers said.
