From Our Leaders

BEN HUBER
Chairman, Board of Directors

In 2010, NorthBay Healthcare embarked on new medical advancements unprecedented in its
50-year history.

It is no boast to say that in the past 12 months, our organization has set the agenda for healthcare in Solano County, shaping the future by bringing more advanced medicine, close to home. We’ve done it while maintaining the quality of compassionate care we deliver.

True to our mission, we pushed ahead to bring more sophisticated services to the north county region. Family, friends and loved ones should not have to travel to other counties to get the care they need.

Here are just some of the major developments we
achieved in 2010:

Stroke – Using bedside robots and telemedicine, NorthBay connected with
the Mercy Neurological Institute of Greater Sacramento to establish the county’s first program to diagnose and
begin treatment of stroke patients. It was a landmark advancement that keeps these patients from being taken far from home.

Center for Women’s Health – This ever-expanding program added new services, focusing on wellness for our female population with an emphasis on preventive care.

GARY PASSAMA
President and CEO

Heart & Vascular Center – After becoming Solano’s first hospital capable of open-heart surgery in 2009, the program continued to advance by laying the foundation to become a STEMI receiving center, the place where those exhibiting signs of a heart attack will go first for emergency treatment.

Center for Primary Care – At the end of the year, the fourth clinic for primary care was ready to open in Vacaville, expanding our market share and adding new choices for families seeking local care from local physicians working for a local healthcare system.

New Technology – Enhancements to our Electronic Medical Records continued, solidifying our position among the most advanced integrated care systems in the nation. And in May, a state-of-the art CT scanner was installed in NorthBay VacaValley Hospital, providing superior diagnostic imaging to physicians treating our patients.

Trauma – NorthBay was first to commit to establishing a trauma program in Solano County. Stepping up to provide life-saving care in our Emergency Department means that by the end of 2011 patients no longer must be transported out of our county for prompt care of most traumatic injuries.

To support the longevity of our mission, we embarked on an ambitious cost-control campaign. We are benchmarking our operations to those of similar community hospitals. Our “supply chain” undergoes constant scrutiny, from what we pay for million-dollar equipment to how we slice the meatloaf in the cafeteria. And we established evidence-based clinical practices to ensure care decisions are derived from solid scientific method and research.

Another guarantee of our longevity is succession planning, a systematic approach to identifying what type of leaders we will need to succeed, whether those leaders exist in our organization, which employees have the potential to grow into those roles, and how to develop our best and brightest to be tomorrow’s NorthBay leaders.

Again, true to our mission of providing compassionate care, advanced medicine, close to home, to anyone regardless of their ability to pay, means we remain agile in these extraordinary economic times. With dwindling public resources – most notably, Medicare, MediCal and mental health services – the community-based hospital is more of a safety net than ever before. We seek creative, cost-effective ways of doing more with the same, or less.

This is what distinguishes our organization from the large, corporate, members-only healthcare provider. Ours is a responsibility that is woven into the fabric of a community. We started here. We are staying here. We have no other interest or business connection anywhere else.

Our success comes from supportive boards of directors, which provide valuable counsel and insight, and most notably, from the 1,700 employees who see themselves as professionals doing work of great consequence, improving the quality of life for each and every patient we treat.