Clinics & hospitals • Forum
Health institutions across Spain are introducing new technologies and ways to ensure Spaniards remain at the top of the global life expectancy league.
CLÍNICA SANTA ELENA IS ONE OF THE PIONEERS of the Catholic health sector in Madrid and Spain. Since its opening, Clínica Santa Elena has managed to bring together prominent professionals and specialists from Madrid’s health sector. We continue to provide qualified health services while also committing to social work in Spain and other countries. Clínica Santa Elena sells services to traditional health insurance companies and private patients. Not only we do allocate resources for social work in Latin America and Africa, but we also invest part of the surpluses in local projects including education centres and geriatric services. We have one of the largest dialysis units for chronic diseases with social comorbidity in Madrid. We seek prestigious professionals who share our organizational values and are highly oriented to patients. As a services company, our success and responsibility lie with our people. We are betting on non-invasive or minimally invasive treatments. These treatments are not particularly expensive, though fairly ground breaking, and include Da Vinci technology, 3D laparoscopy, or high-intensity focused ultrasound.
RIBERA SALUD INTRODUCED THE PPP
MODEL to the health sector in Spain and Europe. We have come a long way, from thinking it would be a one-off project to having nine established projects in Spain. This model is now a Harvard case study and is referenced as an example in many countries. It is a success story that started with the idea of the private sector collaborating with the government to develop new management models. We do not want to be known as hospital managers but rather a company that provides innovative solutions to governments. We are proud of our contract with the Central Laboratory of Madrid even though it is our smallest project; from the point of view of the future of health, it is extraordinary. From a public hospital, we provide services to six more public hospitals, 100 primary care centers, 100 elderly residences, and 1.2 million citizens. This shows that the traditional concept of a laboratory has changed. We need to robotize the entire analysis of samples to improve patients’ safety. We are simultaneously increasing the security of citizens and reducing costs for the government by 60%.
OUT OF THE 5,000 PROFESSIONALS THAT
WORK HERE, there are about 1,000 physicians, 2,500 nurses, and 1,000 researchers. Our annual research budget is EUR55-60 million. If we want to be a reference institution, we need to invest in research and innovation. We are strong in oncology and haematology, with a speciality in the genetic and the genomic background of oncology and haematology diseases. Another key area is neuroscience, including mental health. Within neuroscience, we are strong in brain tumors, autoimmune diseases, encephalitis, and epilepsy. We have a strong team working on cardiovascular research, imaging, and minimal-invasive surgery, as well as nephrology and urology. We are currently doing approximately 500 surgeries in the hospital, but I am sure that in 2020, we will do at least 1,000 operations, mainly neurology, gastroenterology, cardiovascular, and hepatobiliary surgery. I am certain that in different areas, especially imaging and pathology, algorithms for diagnosis and machine learning will be introduced in 2020. We need to learn to progress in this direction.
IMOR IS DEDICATED TO TREATING ONCOLOGY PATIENTS. We treat all kinds of patients and cancer pathologies, mainly through medical and radiation oncology. We have state-of-the-art equipment, and we tend to patients in a clinical context while also doing research and teaching in universities. Oncology is evolving rapidly, and every year there are new treatments and protocols that give better results with less toxicity, so we work to incorporate these new protocols as quickly as possible. One new treatment therapy we have researched and implemented is brachytherapy, particularly for prostate cancer. We have treated more than 2,000 patients using the method, the vast majority of which are doing extremely well. It is an innovative treatment that allows us to give high doses of radiation into the prostate without radiating the normal tissues surrounding the prostate, meaning the side effects are minimal. The treatment is tolerated well by patients, and it is usually done on an outpatient basis within one day.
ALTHOUGH WE OFFER SERVICES RELATED to most specialties, we particularly focus on orthopedics, sport traumatology, surgery, women’s healthcare, urology, otolaryngology, and neurosurgery, among others. We have partnered with the IMOR institute to work on oncology. With our seven operating theaters and state-of-the-art technologies, we are among a select group of hospitals that can treat some extremely severe and rare conditions. Undoubtedly, a good hospital should have a solid internal medicine department, which we certainly have. Even though we are focused on the delivery of our medical services and treating the patients as people rather than patients, we also care about the design and decoration of the hospital in order to decrease the level of stress and create a feeling of comfort. We intend to make people feel at home. We also use a system called the Net Promoter Score, developed by Opinat, that monitors the feelings and feedbacks of our customers in real-time. We are not a huge hospital, and our size makes it manageable for us to satisfy most of our patients.
THE INSTITUTE WAS FOUNDED in 1965 as the first center in Spain to specialize in spinal cord injury and one of the first centers in Europe to follow the postulates of Dr. Ludwig Guttmann. We are a private entity, which enables us to adapt quickly to social changes and innovate in our practices. We are an interdisciplinary organization dedicated entirely to neurorehabilitation, which is about practicing the best specialized rehabilitation in the world today and accompanying people along the process of rehabilitation and social reintegration. About 30 years ago, we started on the path of research as we wanted to generate new knowledge from our clinical practice. We introduced a work methodology based on protocols and good practice guidelines, structured and systematic monitoring of all our patients, both in the rehabilitation process and later in the years following their discharge, and finally the evaluation of results and their comparison with those of the best hospitals around the world. This has led us to establish a number of alliances with care centers and knowledge institutions around the world.