Media contacts:
Ron Sauder, 404/727-3366, rsauder@emory.edu
Kathi Baker, 404/727-9371, kobaker@emory.edu
Janet Christenbury, 404/727-8599, jmchris@emory.edu
January 17, 2003


 



Emory Clinic Celebrates 50th Anniversary in 2003



ATLANTA -- The year is 1953, and the air is ripe with change. Dwight Eisenhower is beginning his two terms in the White House. Edmund Hillary is preparing to conquer Mount Everest. James Watson and Francis Crick are unravelling the structure of DNA. And in Atlanta, with encouragement from Coca-Cola chairman and benefactor Robert W. Woodruff, Emory University launches a new entity known as The Emory Clinic.



For the first time, the faculty physicians of the Emory University School of Medicine form a partnership, with a business structure to support them in billing, collections, record-keeping and other office functions. Their goal is to generate clinical income that will cure the School of Medicine's annual deficits while helping the School become a major national teaching facility.

Flash forward half a century. From modest beginnings, The Emory Clinic has become the largest and most comprehensive group medical practice in Georgia. The School of Medicine is nationally ranked.

With 671 Emory faculty physicians and 2,029 staff members, the Clinic is now hosting nearly 700,000 patient visits a year. Its physical complex has grown dramatically since the doors opened to the first Clinic building in 1956. Facilities now include Clinic A and B, located on Clifton Road across from Emory University Hospital, along with the 1525 Building, which houses primary care and Emory's programs in preventive medicine and wellness. Clinic physicians also practice in a number of health care centers throughout the metropolitan area including Emory Crawford Long Hospital, Northlake, Perimeter, Smyrna, South DeKalb, Wesley Woods, and Emory Medical Affiliates at Sugarloaf.

With all the growth, the Clinic's essential quality has remained constant since the beginning. Emory Clinic physicians are still working at the leading edge of medical practice to bring to their patients the latest and best drugs and procedures.

"What we really have to offer is the high quality of our physicians, who are known not only nationally but internationally for their skills," says Rein Saral, MD, an oncologist and bone marrow transplant specialist who has served as director of the Clinic since 1993. His appointment reflects one of the principal strengths of the Clinic over the past half-century. The Clinic's first full-time director, Dr. Elliott Scarborough, also was a cancer specialist who was recruited to Atlanta by Robert Woodruff from what is now Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York.

"Over the past 50 years untold millions of people have passed through the Emory clinic to receive some of the very best health care in the country," says Michael M.E. Johns, MD, executive vice president for health affairs and director of Emory's Woodruff Health Sciences Center. "Many dedicated and compassionate physicians and staff members have contributed to the efforts of the Clinic. They are to be congratulated for what was created half a century ago, and for what they continue to accomplish for their patients today."

The treatment of cancer has been a strong suit of the Clinic from the beginning. Dr. Saral notes that the Clinic also has many other distinguished centers and departments, attracting patients from Georgia and beyond. They include world-class specialists in surgery, heart disease, eye diseases and disorders, infectious diseases, organ transplant, neurology, orthopaedics, psychiatry, kidney disease, and urology, among others. Emory's Heart Center, long known for its pioneering research and innovative patient care, is the only top 10 cardiology department in the state as ranked by U.S. News & World Report.

"The Emory Clinic reflects the intellectual capital of the Emory University School of Medicine translated into patient care," says Dr. Saral. "We have the doctors' doctors here, the ones who train the physicians, and we continually advance new knowledge in medicine which is applicable to the day to day care of patients."

Equally important to the success of the clinic has been its ability to navigate the nation's changing health care system, notes John Fox, president and CEO of Emory Healthcare, the University's clinical arm which embraces both the Emory Clinic and the Emory Hospitals. "In an ever more complex health care arena, we are fortunate to have a superb operating team led by Clinic COO Don Brunn and CFO Sarah Dekutowski," he says. "It has become apparent that the future of academic medical centers such as ours depends on our ability to offer world-class specialty and subspecialty care while delivering an unsurpassed patient experience, working in partnership with payers and physicians in the community. That's a tall order. It means you have to be on top of your game with both state-of-the-art medicine and business administration."

Currently, challenges faced by the Clinic include the rising cost of malpractice insurance for physicians in Georgia, continuing cutbacks in Medicare reimbursement from the federal government, and ongoing negotiations with managed care organizations and other private insurers. "We feel that we are dealing with all these issues," says Dr. Saral. "We have mechanisms in place to try to address all of them."

As Dr. Saral looks to the next half-century, he sees an unchanging focus on delivering an ever better quality of care. That will mean integrating the new knowledge coming from basic science laboratories at Emory and elsewhere into day-to-day medical practice, and it also means an ever growing emphasis on multidisciplinary care - harnessing the combined insights of different disciplines to attack complex diseases and disorders. More diseases will be approached through better understanding of their genetic roots. Not only will this enable new forms of treatment, it will allow many diseases to be diagnosed earlier when they can be more easily treated or even prevented, Dr. Saral predicts.

Major growth areas at Emory will include heart and vascular disease; the whole spectrum of cancer diagnosis and treatment; and the neurosciences, combining neurology, neurosurgery and psychiatry in new approaches to neurodegenerative diseases and other disorders of the mind. "We will build on the theme of excellence in areas for which we have long been known," says Dr. Saral.

Return to January Index






For more general information on The Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center
call Health Sciences Communication's Office at 404-727-5686,
or send e-mail to hsnews@emory.edu





Copyright © Emory University, 2001. All Rights Reserved.