UW Medical Center - Northwest
Last week Alyssa and I had the opportunity to visit UW Medical Center - Northwest (UWMC-NW). We toured the beautiful campus and hospital and met with lots of wonderful folks in gastroenterology, cardiology, and pulmonary, and hospital medicine.
Situated on a green 44-acre campus, with its roots as a community hospital that cares for STEMI, stroke and Level IV trauma patients, Northwest Hospital officially merged with the UW Medical Center to become the second campus in 2020.
Since the integration, UWMC-NW has evolved considerably, with a large increase in patient volumes and patient complexity. With this growth, the complement of learners on the campus has also grown, offering medical residents and fellows a unique, more community-based learning opportunity within UW Medicine.
In 2024, a new tower, the Frank Chopp Center for Behavioral Health and Learning opened on the campus, bringing a robust, growing, and innovative behavioral health program to the campus. Simultaneously, this building added 50 new med-surg beds to the campus. Also in 2024, Fred Hutch Cancer Center (FHCC) expanded on the campus, with ongoing oncologic growth since then.
Presently UWMC-NW is the primary site of practice for ~150 Department of Medicine (DOM) faculty members. Some DOM highlights on the campus include a large rheumatology clinic with an infusion center, a new outpatient screening endoscopy center, a busy cardiology clinic which includes a cardiac rehabilitation clinic, a vibrant pulmonary clinic, and the FHCC clinic.
A large number of UWMC-NW DOM faculty are hospitalists who take care of a broad scope of patients including general medicine, orthopedics, neurosurgery, oncology and neurology. In an exciting milestone, a UW nephrology service recently launched to provide outstanding consultative care in both the ambulatory and inpatient settings.
We ended our tour by meeting with Laura Quinnan, CMO of UWMC-NW and Jita Pandya Buño, CEO of UWMC, to discuss the future NW strategy with regards to physical space, service line growth, staffing structures, and more! I really see an immense amount of opportunity at UWMC-NW with its capacity for patient care growth which will be important in our ability to “level-load” across all our busy clinical campuses.
P.S. Laika and I crashed the “Dogs of Nephrology” get-together on Saturday morning at Magnuson Park but I figured it was ok because I almost became a nephrologist? Huge thanks to Marisa Benich and Karen de Wolski for organizing this! Should we pivot to a “Dogs of DOM” day at some point? 