The Finest Care, Here at Home

Having tele-intensivists watch over her daughter via video was unsettling at first for Martha Schikschneit. “But once I got used to the ‘doc in the box,’ it was great,” she says. “They kept us informed about her condition and were really good about explaining what they were doing and why.” This new technology is the perfect example of how far Lehigh Valley Hospital has come in bringing to life Leonard Pool’s long-ago vision: to have the very finest health care available right here in the Lehigh Valley. Telemedicine opens whole new ways to share our expertise. Not content with an off-the-shelf approach, we have a system that lets us customize alarm settings for each patient’s unique condition.

The equipment captures data electronically. This gives our ICU staff and tele-intensivists instant information, and frees them from manual charting so they can spend more time attending to patients’ needs. “The system allows us to be even more vigilant in caring for our most critically ill patients by augmenting the bedside physician,” says Stephen Matchett, M.D., medical director of Telehealth Services. “This is proven to shorten hospital stays, improve recovery and in some cases, save lives.” Lehigh Valley Hospital—one of the first true “digital hospitals”—has invested more than $30 million over the last four years in technologies like the tele-intensivist system. Digital archiving of X-rays, MRIs and other images makes it easier for our physicians to access, view and share them. Bar codes on medications and patient wristbands help our nurses ensure that the right patient gets the right drug at the right time. And our physicians order prescriptions and tests directly into computers. The net result is greater safety for our patients and leading-edge health care for our region.

Life-saving surgeries—Just a month apart, Kevin Flynn, 14, and Kara Coder, 10, were severely injured in auto accidents. Neurosurgeon Christopher Lycette, M.D. (center), temporarily removed a portion of each child’s skull to allow for brain swelling. Both are now fully recovered.

The past year offers many examples of leading-edge care. One of the most dramatic involved two children (see photo, right) injured in separate auto accidents and rushed to our trauma unit, near death from intracranial (inside the skull) bleeding. Christopher Lycette, M.D., the new director of neurosurgery at Lehigh Valley Hospital—Muhlenberg, removed half of each child’s skull to make room for brain swelling that could otherwise be fatal. The bone segments were stored in a freezer while the patients spent two weeks in pediatric intensive care, protected by helmets. Months later when the swelling subsided, Lycette replaced the skull segments. “The procedure is not yet widely accepted,” he says, “but it was the best chance for the children’s survival.”

We’re now laying the groundwork for an enhanced pediatric program to better serve all the children of our region. We plan to create a kind of “hospital within the hospital” staffed by a team of physicians and others specializing in childhood conditions. This year, we brought the first pediatric gastroenterologists to our region and added a pediatric rheumatologist, hematologist, allergist and second pediatric surgeon, among others, to our specialty staff.

We’re also developing an Adolescent Medicine Service to better serve an age group prone to behavior that raises the risk for disease or injury. Surveys show that young adults in our own region are especially at risk for obesity, unhealthy eating, binge drinking and smoking. And nationally, adolescents are shown to be less likely than adults to get the good preventive health care they need.

Another specialty that will be a focus of the fund-raising campaign is cancer care.

Our Breast Health Services program has grown 400 percent since 1996, and now serves 30,000 women a year in nine counties. We’ve begun converting to digital mammography, which will dramatically reduce our patients’ waiting times and increase our capacity by up to 50 percent. We also began offering breast MRI this year.

Ovarian cancer is now the fourth-leading cause of cancer deaths in American women. This year, Lehigh Valley Hospital added two gynecologic oncologists (women’s reproductive cancer specialists) to the medical staff for a total of three, the region’s largest such program.

Cancer patients this year are benefiting from a new combined PET/CT scanner. It allows our specialists to diagnose and monitor the stage of cancer and determine its exact location. And for our trauma, heart disease and stroke patients, a new 64-slice CT scanner captures precise images of any area of the body very quickly, reducing the times patients are required to hold their breath during the scan.

Learn more about our Advanced Technology

No more paper charts—Our new T-System replaces the traditional patient chart in the emergency room with an electronic version that caregivers like Laura Scheetz, R.N. (left), and Veronica Wilhelm, R.N., can access on a laptop. The system gives more accurate, detailed patient information and has the potential to shorten wait times even as we treat larger numbers of patients.

At last, a new shoulder—Wilbert Mauser of Allentown had already given up playing ball with his grandchildren, Sean and Jessica, but last January his shoulder pain grew unbearable. Orthopedic surgeon James Hoffman, M.D., offered him a brand-new type of shoulder replacement. Mauser is an active grandpa again.

We debuted three new procedures this year for people with spine and joint problems.
• “Reverse” total shoulder replacement—Unlike the conventional approach, a metal ball is attached to the shoulder bone and a plastic socket to the upper arm bone. This lets the larger deltoid muscle, not the rotator cuff, do the heavy lifting. Our team of 30 fellowship-trained orthopedists includes the only surgeons in the region offering the procedure. It’s ideal for older people with worn-out rotator cuffs who would otherwise have to live with pain and immobility.

• New disc replacement surgery—This pioneering procedure uses an artificial disc made of plastic sandwiched between metal endplates. A boon for selected patients with a diseased disc in the lower spine, it gives them significant pain relief, faster recovery, greater flexibility and fewer complications than spinal fusion.

• Nonsurgical treatment for spine fractures—Our pain specialists now offer percutaneous vertebroplasty to help fracture patients resume normal activity. Medical-grade cement is injected into the collapsed vertebra to stabilize it and ease the pain.

We also added this year to our team of hospitalists, physicians who specialize in caring for you when you’re in the hospital. They function as your doctor’s “eyes and ears,” available 24 hours a day to respond to your needs and answer your questions. Our team now totals 14 hospitalist physicians and one physician assistant.

Postpartum depression has been much in the news this year, and our network’s own Lehigh Valley Physician Group has a new resource for women with this condition. The group set out to address common but undertreated health problems including postpartum depression. The program they created includes patient and physician education and a new Depression After Delivery support group.

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