Milwaukee is chock-full of treasures —
those tiny theaters, museums, public art sculptures and parks that are
tucked away within the urban landscape and are so often overlooked by
the folks who live here. It’s no different with the area’s health
care services, which contain all sorts of hidden gems: Cutting-edge
research studies, specialty centers and doctors who are often better
known on the national scene than in their own backyard.
Greater Milwaukee’s hospital building boom
has received much of the attention in recent years — and for good
reason. Last year, Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare and physician
investors opened a $30 million Midwest Orthopedic Specialty Hospital
in Franklin; Columbia St. Mary’s will open its $417 million, 513-bed
hospital in Milwaukee in October; and Aurora Health Care, which opened
its 223,000-square-foot Aurora Medical Center in Summit earlier this
year, will follow its expansion plans with a new $184 million medical
center in Grafton in November.
And many of the area’s hospitals — most
notably Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, where six of its pediatric
specialties were ranked in the 2010 edition of best children’s
hospitals by U.S. News & World Report — enjoy loads of
well-deserved local and national recognition.
But even inside some of these well-known
facilities, there are doctors, basic and clinical research studies and
community initiatives that have gone unnoticed, at least locally. Here
are some of the few folks — and the programs and research they
manage — that deserve a little extra attention.
It’s not exactly a surprise that Dr.
Michael McCrea, head of neuropsychological services at Waukesha
Memorial Hospital and executive director of the Neuroscience Center at
ProHealth Care Inc. in Waukesha, is frequently called on for his
expertise. It’s who asks for advice that’s so noteworthy.
McCrea’s research of traumatic brain
injuries over the past 16 years has made him one of a small handful of
civilian doctors the United States Department of Defense turns to for
advice.
"Traumatic brain injury is occurring at
really unprecedented rates in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan,
relative to earlier wars," says McCrea. "And it’s posed a
whole new military medical challenge for the Department of Defense.
"
McCrea began working with the DOD in 2006
and nearly three years ago joined a special panel of civilian doctors
that advise the military agency on the assessment and management of
traumatic brain injury. McCrea’s team at Waukesha Memorial
established itself internationally years ago as a leader in research
on sports-related concussions. The team took its findings and
developed a clinical assessment now used by paramedics, EMTs and
emergency medical doctors to determine whether someone has a traumatic
brain injury. This clinical tool, a basic 10-minute examination that
allows someone to assess mental status and acute injury
characteristics, has now been repackaged for use by the military.
While McCrea enjoyed a certain amount of
street credentials at the national level for his clinical research, it
wasn’t until seven years ago when the neuroscience center, which
also houses a traumatic brain injury clinic, opened that the team
received any local attention.
"It’s been a full loop," McCrea
says. "We’re the recognized academic experts, we’ve led the
clinical science and now we can bring all that to the patient in the
clinical setting, and thereby they come to us because of our
recognized expertise."
A Better Path to Cancer Treatment
Dr. Doug Evans, chairman of the department
of surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin and a superstar in
pancreatic cancer treatment, speaks with a rather matter-of-fact tone
as he describes his move to Milwaukee after nearly 20 years at
University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, widely
viewed as the top cancer hospital in the country. That is, until talk
turns to a new clinical trial he is overseeing on pancreatic cancer.
"In spite of patients looking the same
and us treating them the exact same way, some people are cured and
some people have the cancer come back very quickly and unfortunately
die from the disease. Why is that?" asks Evans, before
immediately answering his own question. "That reason isn’t just
the patient’s immune system, but the different makeup of the
individual tumor."
The clinical trial aims to take a needle
biopsy of a pancreatic tumor to help doctors find the molecular
difference so they can change the treatment and ultimately save the
patient. Typically, Evans explains, a biopsy of a tumor is taken when
a patient is first seen. The biopsy is performed under endoscopic
ultrasound, which means a scope is put through a patient’s mouth
while they’re sedated. In the case of pancreatic cancer, the scope
is guided down through the stomach and through the first part of the
small intestine, right next to the pancreas. An ultrasound probe at
the end of the scope allows doctors to do a needle biopsy of the
pancreas.
Under the clinical trial and with the
patient’s consent, a portion of the needle biopsy is sent for
molecular analysis to determine the genetic profile of a pancreas
tumor. Why does that matter? It turns out not all pancreatic tumors
are created the same.
"Right now, the major way to classify
cancer is by the organ of origin," Evans says. "So someone
has breast cancer, someone has lung cancer, someone has prostate
cancer. But that may in fact not be totally correct at a molecular
level, which determines sensitivity to treatment. There may be some
pancreas cancers that actually are biologically more similar to a
brain tumor or colon cancer than pancreas cancer."
Why Milwaukee?
So what exactly attracts some of the country’s
top doctors like Evans, McCrea and other recent additions to the
medical community?
Dr. Mark Malkin, a neuro-oncologist who
spent 18 years as a faculty member and fellow at Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York — a hospital consistently
ranked in the top five cancer facilities in the country — could have
gone anywhere. The same holds true for Evans and some of Froedtert/Medical
College of Wisconsin’s most recent hires, including Clark Gamblin, a
renowned liver surgeon from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of
Medicine.
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Dr. Mark
Malkin
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For Malkin, who came to Froedtert/Medical
College of Wisconsin in 2004, the move was a chance to rebalance his
interests in patient care, research and education. The Midwestern
lifestyle was appealing, and for the first time his son would live in
a city with extended family, Malkin says. Both Evans and Malkin
acknowledged a sort of domino effect that’s created once a hospital
gains a few, well-known physicians.
So how does "friendliness" factor
in? The country’s best physicians typically weigh opportunity and
resources, not gentility. Evans was wooed in large part because of the
newly built clinical cancer center at Froedtert/Medical College of
Wisconsin. But friendliness and a collaborative spirit has been a big
reason Evans and Malkin stayed.
"It’s amazing," Malkin says, as
he recalled a surgeon thanking him in his first several weeks on the
job. "I can’t remember in 18 years at Memorial Sloan-Kettering
anyone saying thank you."
Evans says from a surgical perspective,
Milwaukee is unique. "The physicians have a level of
collaboration that is really something special. I don’t think this
exists anywhere in the U.S."
"Even though we have separate hospital
systems, the cross collaboration at the doctor level is really
incredible. That intangible quality of the people at MCW, Froedtert
and Children’s, as well as the physicians from throughout the city,
is what kind of cemented the deal for me," says Evans.
Other Notable Notables
Special programs, research and institutions
in Milwaukee are too numerous to mention. Among some of the more
notable developments in health care services in the past two years:
BloodCenter of Wisconsin expanded this year
into tissue and organ donation, the first blood center in the country
to do so. In February 2010, the BloodCenter announced it would bring
the Wisconsin Donor Network Organ Procurement Organization and the
Wisconsin Tissue Bank — formerly operated by Froedtert Memorial
Lutheran Hospital and Aurora Health Care, respectively — into its
facility.
Froedtert and the Medical College of
Wisconsin opened in spring 2008 its 173,000-square-foot clinical
cancer center, which houses some 500 physicians, scientists and
nurses. In April 2010, construction began on a 20,000-square-foot
"healing" garden plaza on the eastern side of Froedtert’s
campus in Milwaukee.
Oconomowoc Memorial Hospital is the only
hospital in southeastern Wisconsin using MAKOplasty technology, a
minimally invasive procedure that uses robotics to perform partial
knee resurfacing surgery. The procedure, which combines
three-dimensional images of the patient’s knee with global
positioning-like technology, is used on people suffering from
arthritis.
Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center installed
in 2008 the second-largest hyperbaric chamber in the nation, which can
accommodate up to 24 patients at a time. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is
used to fight infection, promote new skin growth and stimulate small
blood vessel growth in patients suffering from severe wounds, burns,
radiation tissue damage and carbon monoxide poisoning. m
