Hilo Medical Center serves a population of approximately 120,000 throughout the eastern region of the Island of Hawaii.

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Hilo Medical Center has made great strides in healthcare since its modest beginnings as a 10-bed hospital founded in 1897. The hospital built a new facility in 1984 to allow space for 274 licensed beds, home healthcare, additional medical offices, outpatient clinics and an oncology center.

According to CEO Ron Schurra, the hospital is not only the southernmost medical facility in the United States, but it is also the largest on the Big Island of Hawaii. “We have all the services that the average acute care hospital would have, but we also have the second-busiest E.R. in the state,” Schurra says, adding that the department receives 33,000 visits per year.

On an annual basis, Hilo Medical Center delivers more than 1,100 babies, admits 600 long-term care patients, 8,000 acute patients and provides surgical care for more than 3,600 people. Its patient services include physical, occupational and speech therapy, same-day surgery, critical care, cardiac telemetry, cardiac angiography, EEG, psychiatric care and pediatrics.

Community Service
The facility serves a population of approximately 120,000 throughout the eastern region of the island. In addition, Hilo Medical Center is a designated Safety Net hospital, which ensures patients without insurance can receive care when necessary. “We have an obligation to take care of those individuals who don’t have the ability to receive medical care in any other way,” Schurra says.

Hilo Medical Center is a part of Hawaii Health Systems Corporation (HHSC), which operates 13 facilities throughout the island of Hawaii, Maui, Lanai, Kauai and Oahu. The organization was developed in 1996 with the mission to streamline and improve medical services on a local level.

“Right away, the HHSC determined that all regions find ways to locally improve service to the community,” Schurra explains. “One direction we concentrated on from the beginning was physician recruitment. The medical staff and hospital worked together to recruit more doctors into our community.”

Residency Program
To attract more physicians, the medical center partnered with the John A. Barns School of Medicine to develop a family practice residency at the facility. “That’s been a longtime effort, which we started three years ago,” Schurra explains. This is the only program of its kind in the state outside of Honolulu, he adds.

Schurra anticipates that the residency programs will greatly benefit Hilo Medical Center by attracting a number of specialists. “It’s been proven that most residents establish their practice no more than 150 miles from their residency,” he says.

This residency program focuses on rural family practice and will grow into a Rural Health Training Program. “In large city hospitals, routine care is most likely given with many doctors, but this isn’t the case in rural areas,” Schurra says. “These doctors and nurses often have less support and more responsibility, so we’re setting out to train physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, physicians’ assistants, pharmacists and social workers to all work together as a team in rural communities.” Hilo Medical Center is in the middle of a very stable rural community and is the ideal training area for this rural training program.

Top-Notch Training
Physician development is important to the hospital, and it has invested heavily in its training programs through the major assistance of its federal legislators, Schurra says. The facility utilizes computerized mannequins which mimic body responses.

“If a physician, nurse, or pharmacist has a question about a patient’s condition, he or she can go to the computer simulator, and tell it what they think the problem is,” he explains. “Then, the mannequin will mimic the appropriate response.”

In addition, the mannequin training program teaches practitioners how to properly draw both venous and arterial blood. “It also shows people what happens when something goes right or wrong,” Schurra adds. “So, by the time a nurse cares for his or her first patient, they have done it hundreds of times before.”

Hilo Medical Center also installed a computerized robotic system in the pharmacy, which dispenses all prescriptions and monitors each patient’s medications. “This completely eliminates human error,” Schurra explains. “The robot tells us when the prescription needs to be refilled, and restocks itself. In addition, the computer will verify that the combination of medicines will not react negatively.”

Working with its community through the help of the Hilo Medical Center Foundation, the medical center was able to double the size its emergency center with the assistance of mayor, county council, state legislators and governor. This team also joined with the state’s federal legislators to build the states’ first veterans home on the campus.

Innovative Programs
Two years ago, Hilo Medical Center developed a comprehensive hospitalist program to focus on strengthening physicians’ medical services in the hospital environment specifically.

“In collaboration with our medical staff, we have developed and now offer four hospitalist programs including acute medicine, psychiatry, pediatrics and long-term medicine,” Schurra explains.
“We also started an invasive cardiology inpatient and outpatient program – both with very strong results.”