Just a decade — but what a difference
Southcoast celebrates 10 years of making a difference in your community.
See NBC 10 coffee cup salute to Southcoast (QuickTime required)
Southcoast is celebrating a decade of bringing unprecedented, "big city" health care to our communities.
Since our creation in 1996, Southcoast has emerged as the premier health care organization in southeastern Massachusetts, offering state-of-the-art technology and advanced medical and surgical services and making more than $250 million in capital investments.
"Southcoast has worked tirelessly to respond to the changing needs of the communities we serve," said Ronald B. Goodspeed, MD, MPH, President of Southcoast Hospitals Group. "The result is a health system that provides some of the most advanced procedures and care available anywhere."
Some of those services include:
Southcoast's success
The Southcoast merger has been proclaimed as one of the most successful of its kind — and is even taught as a case study at Harvard Business School.
"The root of Southcoast's success is open collaboration between leadership, staff, physicians and the community," said John B. Day, President & CEO of Southcoast Health System.
"That spirit of teamwork was established as an integral part of Southcoast's culture from the very start and continues to flourish to this day, reaching beyond our hospital walls into the community."
Thoughtful expansion of services, technology, locations and infrastructure have also been a trademark of Southcoast's success. But even with three major construction and renovation projects completed in the past six years, Southcoast leadership is not content to sit back and take it easy.
"We are strategically planning to build and strengthen services tailored to the needs of our communities," Day said. "Doing so not only serves the community but makes us a stronger organization."
Planning and activity is not limited to direct services. They include the systems, infrastructure and nurturing the culture necessary to support those services.
Investment in technology
Southcoast continually analyzes and invests in technology that improves the quality of care patients receive, increases efficiency and effectiveness in how care is delivered and helps control costs for everyone.
Southcoast is making ongoing investments in medical technology in order to make the best possible care available here in the communities it serves.
This year, Southcoast will be installing 64-slice CT-scanners with cardiac imaging software at Charlton and Tobey and be upgrading the 40-slice scanner at St. Luke's to a 64-slice machine. The new technology will provide radiologists with more detailed images that will improve their ability to diagnose illness. The cardiac imaging software will enable Southcoast to perform special cardiac and coronary artery studies and profusion studies will be performed for diagnosing stroke patients.
Tobey Hospital's new Surgery Center contains specially-equipped rooms with voice-activated instruments and computers that sit at the operating table and instantly show a patient's lab tests or x-rays.
"There is no crystal ball in health care," Day said. "But, like any sound and successful organization, we do our very best to try and position Southcoast to be strong and relevant to our patients and our communities for years to come.
"We use strategic thinking, data analysis and forecasting to see not only where we are and where we have been, but where we should be going. And where we need to be going."
