Wally Ghurabi, MD
LACMA member since 1983
The new, high-tech Nethercut Emergency Medical Center opened at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopedic Hospital on July 25, under the watchful eye of Walid Ghurabi, MD, medical director of the Santa Monica facility.

The 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged parts of the medical center and upgrading its seismic safety gave the administration the chance to improve the emergency center as part of a larger construction project, Dr. Ghurabi says.

The new 16,000-square-foot emergency center has quite a few improvements over the 7,000-square-foot facility that Dr. Ghurabi spent 27 years in, he says. "It was like Christmas and my birthday combined together," he gushes.

Some of the facility's new features include a pneumatic tube to transport blood work to the 9,000-square-foot laboratory, an all-digital X-ray system, and a 64-slice CT scanner.

Building the new facility while continuing to serve emergency center patients was a tricky undertaking, but the builders managed to construct it in a donut around the older building, while the staff continued to serve its annual patient load of approximately 30,000, Dr. Ghurabi says.

Richard Haskell, MD
OCMA member since 1988
Dr. Haskell, a cardiologist, received the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners' State Award for Nurse Practitioner Advocate at a June 21 awards ceremony during the organization's annual national conference in Indianapolis. As medical director of cardiology at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach and as an instructor at UCLA, Dr. Haskell fits physician extenders into hospital roles where they can often be more effective than physicians and helps train student physician extenders during their rotations.

Nurse practitioners "will follow the protocols, whereas doctors tend to wing it on their own," explains Dr. Haskell. "The best example is that we've had nurse practitioners help in the hospital when patients have congestive heart failure," he says. "If you assign a nurse practitioner that job and say, 'You're going to go see every patient who's been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and make sure the following 10 things get done,' they actually do it--and they do a great job."

Dr. Haskell says nurse practitioners are most useful in fields such as obstetrics, gynecology and pediatrics, where they can save a doctor's time and effort by performing common procedures and deciding when certain patients need a physician's specialized attention. "It is the wave of the future," he adds.

Steven Ross, MD
OCMA member since 1985
Dr. Ross became president of the American Orthopaedic Foot & Ankle Society at a July 14 ceremony during the group's annual meeting in Toronto. A clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at UC Irvine Medical Center and director of its foot and ankle service, Dr. Ross also serves as the AOFAS delegate to the American Medical Association.

In his new role with the AOFAS, Dr. Ross aims to encourage physician advocacy on local, state and national levels. "Like everything else, our job is to try to educate the public to understand what they need, and to make sure they understand who would be best equipped to provide for those needs," Dr. Ross says.

Although it represents about 1,600 physicians in a subspecialty, the AOFAS is concerned about many of the same issues as the California Medical Association, such as Blue Cross' unilateral fee schedule reductions. "It's hard to predict how things will change," Dr. Ross says. "But I don't think it's good for society in general to have so much power on one side--there's no give and take. They just kind of do what they want to do, and you either take it or leave it."

Richard Frankenstein, MD
OCMA member since 1981
Dr. Frankenstein, California Medical Association president-elect, was selected to communicate the CMA's interests on the informal advisory committee that state Sen. Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) assembled this year to inform him on healthcare matters. The committee had been meeting every two to three weeks, but was disrupted for a bit during the summer budget stalemate in the Legislature, says Tammy Tran, a spokeswoman for the senator.

During the initial meetings, Dr. Frankenstein says his message was direct. "I've made it clear that there are lots of reform ideas being talked about in Sacramento that we don't like," he says. So far, Dr. Frankenstein has advocated only "CMA's position that we are interested in things that will help people to see doctors, as opposed to impeding people from seeing their doctors," he says.

Correa voted against the single-payer plan offered by state Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Los Angeles). And he has not yet supported AB 8, the leading Democratic health plan in the Assembly. "He believes it is still a work in progress," says John Scribner, a spokesman for Correa.

The health advisory group also includes a community doctor, an attorney, a former CalOptima medical director, a hospital CEO and a health economics professor from UC Irvine, Dr. Frankenstein says.

John Patrick Johnson, MD
LACMA member since 1987
Dr. Johnson was named director of education and co-director of spine stem cell research at the Cedars-Sinai Institute for Spinal Disorders in Los Angeles. Dr. Johnson made the change from his prior position as director of the institute so he could focus more on research.

"I had been the director of the spine institute for the past six years, and rather than run the entire program, which involved about 20 physicians, I decided to refocus what I was doing," Dr. Johnson says. In his new job, he oversees a lab of four PhDs and four research technicians. "Now that I don't have a lot of those administrative duties and headaches, I can focus on the research work, the education, the teaching and also building the program."

The research program's overall goal is to develop methods to process adult stem cells for use in repairing spine damage. "To take cells out of their fat, isolate the stem cells and process them to where they'll heal bones better than they've ever done--that's the first step," Dr. Johnson says. If the research is successful, the lab may start a clinical trial, perhaps in the next one to three years, he says. Once the method has been worked out, the team will start on more difficult goals, such as regenerating spinal discs, he adds.