Miller Children’s & Women’s Hospital Long Beach has partnered with UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital. The collaboration, in addition to bringing together research expertise and care services, will expand Miller Children’s presence in Southern California via an outpatient care model.
The hospital, which is one of the five hospitals within MemorialCare Health System has 28 outpatient centers from Torrance down to Irvine.
“It’s two children’s hospitals joint venturing to provide better services to the communities and grow our respective audience,” said John Bishop, chief executive of MemorialCare’s Long Beach-based hospitals including Miller Children’s, Long Beach Memorial Medical Center and Community Hospital Long Beach. “We are contemplating [opening] a new facility—outpatient-centric with multiple specialties—co-branded under the name UCLA Mattel-Miller Children’s Health.”
Bishop said the two organizations share similar missions and values and can now expand their geography and broaden specialty care capacity. He added that they plan to have multiple co-branded outpatient centers on new or existing sites. Physicians will come from both organizations.
Miller Children’s and Mattel Children’s are tertiary care medical centers that provide care for “the sickest of the sick,” said Bishop.
Care is generally given via the three levels of medical care from primary through tertiary. Conditions requiring tertiary care include severe trauma, rare diseases, burn care, cancer therapy and organ transplant.
Both centers provide a wide range of pediatric care. The 369-bed Miller Children’s is one of 22 hospitals in California that has a level three—the highest designation available in California—neonatal intensive care unit. The 95-bed unit is the largest in Southern California dedicated to treating critically ill and premature babies. It also has the only stroke clinics in Southern California that treat children under the age of one.
Mattel Children’s is known for organ transplants. The academic center, which has a pediatric heart-lung transplant program, is one of the major referral centers for those surgeries. It performed the highest combined number of heart and lung transplants among medical centers last year—103 adult lung transplants, 58 adult heart transplants and nine pediatric heart transplants—according to the nonprofit United Network for Organ Sharing.
“We are very complementary, together we run the entire gamut [of tertiary pediatric care services],” Bishop said. He added that the centers are on campuses with sister adult teaching hospitals, which allows patients to receive uninterrupted care from childhood to adulthood in one system.
Laura Lundquist, vice president of Miller Children’s outpatient specialty center, said response has been very positive. “They [parents] like the concept of getting specialists to see their kids as fast as possible, and in this outpatient model—most kids in our hospital have chronic issues—kids who don’t have to get acute care can get treated in a healthier, less intimidating environment.”
Miller Children’s previously announced a new pediatric outpatient center in Irvine, its first in OC, to provide a range of “sub-specialty care” including gastroenterology, orthopedics, neurology and pulmonology. Lundquist said outpatient centers, like the one in Irvine, give families another choice for specialty care for things like asthma or a sprained wrist.
The organizations will work with the University of California-Irvine to expand residency and medical education programs, as well as clinical education of residents and fellows that include residency rotations for pediatric experiences and training programs. Miller Children’s has existing pediatric residency and teaching relationships with UCI.
Bishop anticipates announcing plans for new outpatient center openings next year. “We’ll be discussing with more clarity how we can partner together in the next three to five months.”
MemorialCare has about 11,000 employees. It’s comprised of five hospitals, two medical groups, a health plan and a number of outpatient and other centers. Its Miller Children’s unit has nearly 1,500 employees and a team of 900 medical staff.
