by Nick Jacobs

Once we embraced this Planetree philosophy our infection rate fell to between zero and one and a half percent. Our mortality rate for adjusted acuity is the lowest in our region, and our length of stay is only 3.4 days. So our patients are getting fewer diseases from our hospital, they are getting out sooner, and most importantly, they’re living while others are not. We have had large increases in the emergency room visitations, laboratory testing, and outpatient surgery.

We have dozens of religious including: ministers, priests and a rabbi who come to our hospital to pray with our patients. We have two employed ministers on staff. A behavioral psychologist, aroma therapist and massage therapist visit our patients. Each day we bake bread in the hallways. We have live music, a string trio, piano players and others in our lobbies and halls. You will see and hear fountains. There are plants, and skylights . . . and all of this happened in just four short years because of a dream to create a truly healing environment.

We began attracting partners and those partnerships include, the United Stares Department of Defense, the Walter Reed Army Health System, the Henry Jackson Foundation, and the Georgetown, the University of Pittsburgh, UCSF, UNLV, and Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands as we embrace spiritual magic and hard core systemic micro diagnostics. We embrace the power of love and prayer, and we marry these concepts with the all of the most complex, analytical technologies in the world . . . in a way that makes a real difference.

Because Windber Medical Center started as a coal mining hospital owned by the company. Our patients came to be cared for by the paternal Coal Company in 1906.

Historically, the old hospital had a vibrant reputation into the 50’s and 60’s. We have performed our famous thyroid surgery in the 50’s and 60’s on Hollywood movie stars and multi-millionaires including: Jeanne Woolworth, Arthur Godfrey and even Betty Grable.

Because we have a very old population in an area of low to no population growth, our first step was to build a building that would house our dreams, and so, we decided that it would be our goal not to build what people would like, but to build what people would love.

In order to compete, we needed to be competitive, and what we quickly learned was, the bigger the dream, the better the funding. So, we do not limit ourselves to Windber, PA, USA. We do not limit ourselves to one population. We saw the world as our partner. We have received over $50M in grants in the past four years.

In January of 2000, the building was completed. It had been designed to house rehabilitation, a heart disease reversal program, and integrative health. The Integrative Health Center was for traditional therapies as well as complementary and alternative therapies. Included in our programs, we offer yoga, stress management, Tai-Chi, Ai-Chi, Reiki, Spiritual Counseling, Aroma Therapy, Massage, Infant Massage, Music Therapy and Acupuncture.

We believe that the healing arts are nutrition for the soul.

Because we wanted everyone to feel as if they were in the best five star hotel, a spa and a healing garden, we hired a hotel manager to run our housekeeping, dietary and maintenance departments and provide room service, fresh flowers, bread, live music, artwork, fountains, and invite loved ones to stay with their sick relatives. We have unlimited visiting hours. We also provide pajama bottoms and bathrobes. More like their home or better. A healing environment.

In our birthing suites, we have midwives, in room deliveries, and use such complementary therapies as birthing balls, aromatherapy, music and massage therapy, infant massage, Jacuzzi tubs, and hand held massagers. We also have double beds for the families to use after the baby is born. Mother, father and baby occupy the same room.

These birthing suites also contain computer hook ups to the internet, live music, TV-VCR and we bake fresh bread daily and offer tea and coffee.

As part of our commitment to the community, we have added a “Center for Life.” This is the Senior Center for senior citizens. Seniors come each day, have access to our gym, our doctors and trained staff. In this center, older citizens have access to social services and preventative health options.

The medical center has a palliative care unit for our hospice for pain control, respite for the family and end of life care. We can accommodate a family of four in each patient room.

The Joyce Murtha Breast Care Center is a model of breast care for women. It contains all state of the art equipment for digital mammography, MRI beast coils, breast biopsy, osteoporosis, ultrasound, and even has a cosmetologist to assist women who have lost their hair from chemotherapy.

In order to treat our patients with dignity we put our employees through comprehensive training.

The year we started the program, our fortunes reversed themselves.

The high touch work of Windber Medical Center is enhanced completely by the high tech world of the organization that we founded, The Windber Research Institute. It is a fully integrated facility specifically designed for Functional Genomics, proteomics and Biomedical and Bioinformatics Research. It includes a tissue bank and comprehensive data warehouse.

WRI was established as a Center of Excellence for biomedical research, where state of the art technologies are assembled, integrated and used to study human disease at molecular, cellular and systems levels.

Our partnerships revolve around our tissue banking center where specimens are being collected to trace the genomic, proteomic, and histopathological makeup of various stages of diseased and healthy tissue from throughout the world.

Our bioinformatics and data integration are world class. We have advanced computational tools for bioinformatics and construction of databases that links biologically relevant data with clinical data. It is all on a single framework that makes it easy to query.

The team is multidisciplinary and brings all necessary skills to the table through high throughput protein research, one of our specialties within our specialties. Our proteomic platforms are robotic and capable of handling over 3000 samples per day in global protein profiling, clinical proteomics and target identification.

Our partners are numerous. Our international partners are well known. And all of this came from a dream from a kid in East Liberty who said his prayers, delivered his papers, took care of his neighbors, and practiced his butt off in the face of a brutal group of patriarchal leaders who are threatened by the nurturing touch needed to accomplish these tasks.