Notes from the President

Hospital leadership in today’s world is always challenging, particularly in California. A leader’s influence and legacy lasts long into the future. Ruthita Fike has served Loma Linda University Medical Center well as the CEO of our hospital system for 10 years. As she now prepares to step down from that role, I want to recognize her significant contribution in helping establish what we know as Loma Linda University Health System today. This hospital network has grown to six individual hospitals under her guidance, each with a carefully focused purpose and strategy. Let me comment on each of these institutions and the legacy Ruthita will leave with us.

Our current Medical Center, the clover-leaf towers completed in 1967, was designated some years ago as the University Hospital, serving primarily adult patients. At that time the adjoining Children’s Hospital was given an identity of its own. Ruthita is now leading the effort to obtain a separate licensure for the Children’s Hospital as the next step in its full establishment, which we hope to accomplish before she leaves in July.

Moving down Barton Road toward Redlands from the main hospital, the East Campus includes the old Loma Linda Community Hospital, an adjoining large outpatient facility, and the new Tom & Vi Zapara Rehabilitation Pavilion, with 24 state-of-the-art patient rooms. This campus, with its beautiful landscaping and children’s park, has been designated the Rehabilitation, Orthopedic, and Neurosciences Institute, or RONI. The physician groups working there include physical medicine and rehabilitation, orthopedics, and neurosurgery. Together their clinical services have been integrated to provide innovative therapies for all rehabilitation needs.

Another mile further east on Barton Road is our new Heart & Surgical Hospital. Purchased in 2008 from a group of investors as the building was nearing completion, this 28-bed, high-tech hospital now houses our two da Vinci robotic surgical units. The surgeons work remotely from a computer screen, with their instruments inserted through several small slits in the skin, rather than an open incision. This greatly speeds recovery time and enhances patient satisfaction. Used by various surgical specialties, particularly urology, head and neck, and gynecology, the Heart and Surgical Hospital receives some of our highest patient accolades for its superb services and caring staff.

Less than a mile further down Barton Road, now in Redlands city limits, is our Behavioral Medicine Center. It is one of only two psychiatric hospitals in the Inland Empire, and the only one that accepts children. With the new Behavioral Health Institute outpatient building next door, Loma Linda now has one of the most comprehensive mental health units in the country, offering integrated patient services and quality training for our students in psychology, counseling, social work, and the physician residents in psychiatry. This facility treats a wide spectrum of diseases, including various addictions, eating disorders, self-harm, depression, anxiety, and other mental health concerns.

If you now head east on I-10 toward Palm Springs, you will come to our new Highland Springs Medical Plaza. Just south of the freeway in Beaumont, this facility is operated in conjunction with Redlands Community Hospital and the Beaver Medical Group. It includes an ambulatory surgery center, imaging center, and a medical office building. It serves the rapidly growing population in the Beaumont and Banning communities.

Our newest hospital is our Loma Linda University Medical Center–Murrieta, located between Riverside and Escondido on Interstate 215. A 106-bed ultramodern community hospital, Murrieta has quickly gained recognition in that area as a place with quality and caring professionals. It shares some physicians and other staff with Loma Linda, while others are based locally and now use this as their primary hospital.

Back on the main campus, the 800 doctors in our Faculty Medical Group have now merged into one corporation and provide the medical leadership and coverage for these institutions. They provide all medical specialties, with nationally recognized expertise in many subspecialty areas. In addition to their clinical roles, these physicians provide supervision and training for our medical students and 700 physician residents in specialty training.

In addition to these six hospitals and the clinic complex in Beaumont that are owned by Loma Linda, Ruthita has led out in conceptualizing a broader network of community hospitals in the Inland Empire. Though the exact nature of these relationships is still being developed, they will give Loma Linda the ability to anchor an Accountable Care Organization, the new name for the horizontally and vertically integrated systems encouraged by the Affordable Care Act.

Though perhaps less visible, another major contribution to the Loma Linda system that Ruthita has guided is our growing system of Institutes. This designation pulls together all the clinical disciplines around particular disease entities or organ systems, like heart or cancer or transplants. There are now 10 of these focused Institutes on campus, providing more efficient and integrated clinical care in the clinical institutes, or a place to orchestrate institutional priorities like wholeness, global, or community activities in the other institutes.

Though there are many things that Ruthita will be remembered for, developing our regional strategy and health system network will be foremost among them. Through her active leadership roles in the Hospital Association of Southern California and the California Hospital Association, she has also given Loma Linda a recognized place within California’s health care community. Now as we prepare to embark on our campus transformation strategy, with plans to build two new hospitals and expanded clinical services, we are forever grateful for the solid foundation she has built.

Thank you, Ruthita, for helping to define our campus for the future. You will be missed.

Cordially yours,

Richard Hart, MD, DrPH
President, Loma Linda University Health