From Our Leaders

BEN HUBER
Chairman, Board of Directors

The 12 months of 2009 were a sprint – from start to finish.

It was a year marked by successes due, in no small part, to a talented, dedicated team of 1,700 frontline workers, managers and administrators who live the mission of NorthBay Healthcare every day: Compassionate care, advanced medicine, close to home.

Let us take you through just a partial checklist of 2009 achievements:

Cardiac Surgery and Interventional Vascular Procedures – The NorthBay Heart & Vascular Center, which officially opened in 2009, began to hit its stride, bringing to Solano County the first advanced open-heart and vascular procedures.

Finances – Despite unrelenting state and federal cuts, we were able to reinvest in new technology and to expand advanced medical services.

GARY PASSAMA
Presidents and CEO

The Intensivist Program – Our 24/7 physician coverage in our two acute-care hospitals now comprises six specialties.

Solano Diagnostic Imaging – Our stand-alone center, which includes the Women’s Imaging Center, increased its volume to nearly 30,000 patients.

Fab New Lab – A much-anticipated $5.5 million clinical laboratory was constructed at NorthBay Medical Center, replacing a crammed facility.

EMR – The next step in Electronic Medical Records was a huge stride. Physicians abandoned paper-and-ink charts for Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE), which puts our two hospitals in the top 1.5% of all hospitals nationwide.

These are only a handful of more than 30 new initiatives we started or completed in 2009, many invisible to patients whose quality of care was improved.

Looking ahead to 2010, we have opened the doors to an inventive Center for Women’s Health. We will continue to develop the Heart & Vascular Center. And in Vacaville we will open a fourth location for the Center for Primary Care.

NorthBay VacaValley Hospital will have a new 64-slice CAT scanner in operation in 2010, with an even more sophisticated unit coming soon to NorthBay Medical Center.

Our work continues planning for an expansion of the Vacaville medical campus, a location where we can upgrade trauma emergency services.

Behind the scenes, at least from a patient’s perspective, are myriad plans to increase the sophistication of services and the skill level of our healthcare professionals. We are embarking on a journey to make NorthBay a Magnet Nursing Program, a distinction of excellence. By this time next year we hope to be designated a Stroke Center as well. All the while, we continue to strive to improve our quality indicators and patient satisfaction.

Continued success comes from committed and supportive boards of directors, which provide valuable advice, counsel and insights, and most notably, from employees who have stood by NorthBay in good times and bad, all the time striving to improve the quality of care for each and every patient.