WORCESTER

'Enabling others to build the best pediatric care'

Boston Children's Hospital CEO is Worcester Economic Club speaker

Steven H. Foskett Jr.
steven.foskett@telegram.com
Sandra Fenwick, president and CEO of Boston Children's Hospital [Submitted Photo] She is speaking June 12, 2019, at Worcester Economic Club

WORCESTER - Founded 150 years ago on the simple idea of taking care of kids, Boston Children's Hospital still revolves around that core principal, but President and CEO Sandra Fenwick said there's much, much more to the story.

Before her keynote address to the 558th meeting of the Worcester Economic Club at the College of the Holy Cross Wednesday night, Ms. Fenwick detailed the depth and breadth of research started in labs and clinical trials at Boston Children's Hospital.

She described the process that teams at Boston Children's went through over two decades of basic science research and genome study to combat sickle cell anemia; a breakthrough that paved the way for the discovery of a "fetal hemoglobin switch," and subsequent trials using infusions of gene-modified cells that resulted in the first patient becoming disease-free. The hospital recently infused the second and third patients, and plans to infuse the fourth patient later this month, Ms. Fenwick said.

Another patient Ms. Fenwick described couldn't talk or walk without assistance and suffered up to 30 seizures a day; she had recently gone blind. In just 10 months, a Boston Children's doctor and his team identified the girl's unique genetic mutation, designed a drug to fix it, and launched an FDA-approved clinical trial. After her treatment, her condition stabilized; the research, Ms. Fenwick said, could be scaled to address genetic mutations across many diseases.

Ms. Fenwick said the lesser-known but significant research and development going on at Boston Children's - the hospital is the top recipient among pediatric hospitals for funding from the National Institutes of Health, and currently has nearly 400 active clinical trials underway - makes its way to the bedside of children from across the U.S. and the globe. She noted that research and medical breakthroughs have long been part of the Boston Children's narrative. The polio virus was cultured at Boston Children's, and the first chemotherapy treatment in a child happened at the hospital, Ms. Fenwick said.

She said the hospital has also worked to reach beyond its Boston campus to offer its expertise everywhere from community health centers to surgical centers and hospitals across the state. She said the hospital's reach extends from Cape Cod to North Adams, through staffing specialty services and offering primary care physicians. The hospital staffs pediatric services in nine community hospitals, she said.

"We believe in not necessarily owning and building a system, but enabling others to build the best pediatric care they can," Ms. Fenwick said. 

Increasingly, the hospital is closely examining the entire experience of a patient and the patient's family while being treated at Children's Hospital, and that includes everything from wait times to accessibility, Ms. Fenwick said.

She talked about Circulation, a company the hospital started to lower no-show rates for follow-up care. It leverages on-demand services like Uber and Lyft and other types of specialized transportation to get patients to appointments. After implementing the system at Boston Children's, the no-show rate for follow-up appointments went from 50% to 8%, she said. The hospital has since sold the company, which operates in 1,500 health systems, Ms. Fenwick said. It was about recognizing a problem and finding a solution, she said.

She said the hospital recently celebrated the legacy of longtime Boston Children's physician Dr. David Nathan, who came on staff in 1963 and worked more than 50 years in leadership at the hospital.

"He always said it's not the doctors' hospital, it's not our hospital, but it's the patients' hospital," Ms. Fenwick said. "The training, the orientation of everyone who comes to Children's is putting the patient at the center of everything we do."