Phil and Penny Knight are giving $25 million to Providence Health & Services for heart care, their biggest donation ever to the hospital system and the latest major medical gift from Nike's co-founder and his wife.
The money will be funneled into a new cardiovascular center at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center, for cutting edge treatment and surgeries and also for prevention and research.
Providence officials, who announced the gift Tuesday, are thrilled.
"It's a great vote of confidence from the Knights for the work that we've been doing for the last several decades," said Dr. Dan Oseran, head of the institute. "This will create the capacity to serve more patients and allow us to serve patients better."
Oseran has been courting Oregon's power couple for a year, even before the Knights announced a $500 million challenge grant to OHSU Knight Cancer Institute last September. Unlike that gift, this one has no strings attached though Providence officials said Tuesday they are launching a five-year capital campaign, hoping to double the Knight's donation.
Heart disease is the No. 1 cause of mortality in the United States, killing 600,000 people a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Oregon, Providence is the top provider of cardiovascular services, Oseran said, serving more than 13,000 people a year.
The hospital system has marked many milestones, Oseran said. Earlier this year, Providence physicians became the first in the Northwest to implant a wireless defibrillator in a patient. In the fall, they will insert a wireless pacemaker, another first for Oregon. And two years ago, they implanted a mechanical heart valve in a patient by threading it through the femoral artery from the groin to the man's heart in the first such operation on the West Coast.
This procedure was possible, in part, thanks to a $1 million gift from the Knights in 2000. Providence used the money to create a state-of-the-art operating room, named after Penny Knight's mother, Dorothie Parks, that allows surgeons to perform minimally invasive procedures using the latest techniques.
Surgeons at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center performed the first percutaneous mitral valve repair in Oregon earlier this year in a state-of-the-art operating suite built, in part, with a $1 million grant in 2000 from Phil and Penny Knight. The minimally invasive procedure uses a robotic arm to repair leaking mitral heart valves, allowing the heart to pump blood more efficiently.
The surgical suite is the first of its type on the West Coast, Oseran said, benefiting hundreds of patients.
They include John Bartels, a 76-year-old Portlander who has suffered from congestive heart disease for more than 20 years. He's had two open-heart surgeries – the first in 2000 for arterial heart grafts and the second in 2005 when surgeons replaced his clogged-up aortic valve. Five years later, the valve started filling up again with calcium deposits, restricting the flow of blood throughout his body. His energy level slowed to a crawl and he struggled with his short-term memory.
"For a researcher and a writer, that's really bad news," said Bartels, a freelance energy expert.
He needed the valve replaced, but couldn't face another bout of open-heart surgery. He didn't want his sternum sawed open. He worried about being anesthetized for four hours or longer. He couldn't face months, perhaps a year of recovery.
In January, surgeons operated but this time inserted a mechanical heart valve using minimally invasive techniques. The operation took less than two hours compared with four-plus for open heart surgery. He was ready to leave the next day, and by April was pumping weights and jogging on the treadmill.
"It changed my life immediately and dramatically," Bartels said. "I haven't felt this strong for 20 years."
Besides offering state-of-the-art surgeries, the new center at St. Vincent will house a range of services, allowing patients to get their Pacemaker and blood checked, for example, see a nutritionist and attend a cardiac rehab class all in one location.
The donation will help Providence attract more top talent, too, including surgeons, researchers and data specialists, Oseran said.
The hospital system, with nearly 40 facilities in five states, including eight in Oregon, has a massive database that includes records of 10 to 12 million patients. By mining that data, which includes symptoms, procedures and outcomes, Providence hopes to partner with others and establish new models for clinical research. That data will help Providence physicians better identify which patients are most likely to be readmitted to the hospital and try to prevent that, Oseran said.
"This is a unique asset that we have that few other cardiac institutes have," Oseran said. "For our donors that's a wonderful thing because it has an amplifying effect."
-- Lynne Terry