Making medical history
An $838M neuroscience center, the ‘largest’ in Connecticut, is coming to Yale New Haven
Shovels finally scooped dirt Wednesday for the new Adams Neurosciences Center at Yale New Haven Hospital, 16 months after the $838 million project to focus the latest advances in surgery and medicine was announced.
The project, which will take up 505,000 square feet of the block where the St. Raphael campus is located, is “the largest single health care project in the history of Connecticut and it leverages the strengths of clinical neurology and neurosurgery,” according to Dr. Charles Matouk, vice chairman of neurosurgery at the Yale School of Medicine.
Treatment for neurological diseases such as stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders will be centered in the two towers, one rising above the Mcgivney Advance Surgery Center on George Street, the other next door.
The main advantage will be “just having everything together” with state-of-the-art equipment and patient facilities, said Dr. David Hafler, chairman of the hospital’s Department of Neurology. “I think a lot of the new things there will be involved more in the neurosurgical domain.
“The ability to move patients from the emergency room to proper treatment for stroke, where time is brain, the epilepsy, the monitoring unit, all will be state of the art and just absolutely terrific,” he said.
Stephen Adams, who with his wife, Denise, has pledged a multiyear donation, has had Parkinson’s for more than 18 years, according to his wife, though he donned a hard hat and took a shovel for the ceremonial groundbreaking. A 1959 graduate of Yale University, he is a board member and co-owner of Camping World Holdings and a retired entrepreneur.
“It’s going to aid in infrastructure for the ultra-rapid treatment of those patients,” Matouk said. “The more blood that can be saved … the better patients do.”
There also will be “two next-generation biplane angiography suites that are housed just outside the Emergency Department on the first floor,” he said. “The patients will arrive directly, within a minute or two will be in the angio suite, where the procedures can be performed within minutes of a patient’s arrival to the hospital.”
Biplane angiography involves two angiograms — X-rays of the blood vessels after injecting a chemical fluid — taken at two
different angles.
There also will be “a whole neurosurgical operating area with multiple operating rooms and a third biplane operating room,” Matouk said.
This will avoid the situation now in which, if a patient is being treated and “an emergency comes in and we only have one room, then the case would be bumped for the emergency,” he said.
Yale New Haven also is an organizing hub for the National Institute of Health’s Strokenet. The region includes Hartford Hospital, Rhode Island Hospital, which is affiliated with Brown University’s medical school, and Northwell Health, in New Hyde Park, N.Y.
“So we’ve created processes within the hospital to attract and deliver cutting-edge research clinical studies, and Strokenet is on example,” Matouk said.
The hospital also will be affiliated with a new initiative at the Yale School of Medicine, where Dean Nancy Brown “announced the creation of something called the Yale Center for Brain and Mind Health,” Matouk said. It will “promote interdisciplinary clinical and translational research on conditions that affect the brain and mind.”
Among advances in Parkinson’s disease are procedures “stimulating structures that can reduce the symptoms of the disease,” as well as post-traumatic stress disorder,
“and being able to modulate the brain activity to improve rehabilitation after brain injuries, such as TBI and stroke,” he said.
An emerging area, Matouk said, is a “brain/machine interface.”
“If a patient hat a condition where they couldn’t move an arm because a nerve was severed, a computer, through a minimally invasive procedure could translate your brain activity, like your thoughts,, into some kind of action that is implemented by a robot or computer,” he said.
The neuroscience center is designed in part of leverage those new innovations,” he said.
Christopher O’connor, president and CEO of Yale New Haven
Health, said “the physical and financial size and scope of this project reflects the health system’s commitment to the city of New Haven, to the state of Connecticut and beyond. The project reaffirms Yale New Haven Hospital’s commitment to invest in the St. Raphael campus, in a transaction that took place just 10 years ago.”
O’connor led the Hospital of St. Raphael when it was bought by Yale New Haven. St. Raphael’s was sponsored by the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth, and opened Jan. 6, 1908.