Henry Ford Hospital - History

History

1915: Henry Ford Hospital opens its doors to patients. The hospital is financed and built by automotive pioneer Henry Ford, who organized a closed staff of physicians and surgeons, many of whom came from Johns Hopkins.

It is one of the first U.S. hospitals to use a standard fee schedule and favor private or semi-private rooms over large wards. It also is the first hospital in the country to form a closed, salaried medical staff. And, because of founder Henry Ford's concern that tobacco is unhealthy, the hospital is one of the first hospitals in the U.S. to institute a total ban on smoking.

1923: Under the direction of Dr. Thomas J. Heldt, Henry Ford is one of the country's first general hospitals to establish a psychiatric unit.

1935: Dr. Roy McClure begins adding iodine to kitchen salt to prevent the development of endemic goiters. Eventually salt for human use is iodized by law.

1940: Dr. Conrad Lam is the nation's first physician to administer purified heparin to treat clotting of veins.

1942: Henry Ford is one of a few U.S. hospitals selected by the National Research Council as a trial site to test penicillin.

1943: Henry Ford’s Dr. Frank Hartman develops the liquid Oxygen Tent.

1944: Henry Ford becomes the first hospital to use the now-routine technique of multiple lead electrocardiograms.

1951: Drs. Conrad Lam and Edward Munnell developed a technique for the correction of mitral valve stenosis, using a special six-finger glove with a knife attached to the sixth mid-palm finger.

1952: Henry Ford vascular surgeon Dr. D. Emerick Szilagyi performs one of the world's first grafts of an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

1956: Henry Ford cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Conrad Lam performs the first successful open heart surgery in Michigan using the heart-lung machine.

That same year, Henry Ford’s Dr. James Barron develops the Barron Food Pump, a device used to deliver pureed food through a small nasal gastric tube.

1967: Dr. George Mikhail performs Detroit's first Mohs Micrographic Surgery, a procedure to remove skin cancers.

1968: The first allogenic kidney transplant is done in Detroit by Drs. D. Emerick Szilagyi, Joseph P. Elliott and Roger F. Smith.

1973: Michigan’s first renal transplant to a diabetic patient is performed by Dr. Stanley Dienst.

1979: Henry Ford is one of the pioneers in performing coronary angioplasty, revolutionizing cardiology care for patients with coronary disease.

1980: Drs. Fred W. Whitehouse and Dorothy A. Kahkonen are the first physicians in Michigan and the second in the country to administer human insulin to a patient with diabetes.

1985: Drs. Fraser Keith and Donald Magilligan perform Detroit's first heart transplant.

That same year, the first extracorporal shock wave lithotripsy in Michigan is performed at Henry Ford. This non-invasive procedure breaks kidney stones into sand-like grains which are easily passed from the body.

1987: Dr. Charles Jackson and other Henry Ford and Yale researchers identify the location of a gene on chromosome 10, linked to hereditary medullary thyroid cancer. In 1993, the gene itself is identified.

Also that year, Henry Ford is the first in Michigan to use iodine radium implant seeds to combat cancerous cells in the prostate.

1988: Detroit’s first liver transplant is performed at Henry Ford.

1994: Henry Ford performs the first lung transplant in metro Detroit, making it the only facility in metro Detroit to perform all solid organ transplants.

1995: Henry Ford conducts Michigan's first radiosurgery treatment for patients with inoperable tumors using the three-dimensional x-knife system.

1996: Henry Ford performs the state's first split-liver transplant, during which a donor's liver is split in two and the halves are transplanted into two patients.

1998: Henry Ford is the first in Michigan to offer genetic testing for breast cancer.

2000: Henry Ford Hospital performs Michigan's first adult-to-adult, living donor liver transplant.

2001: The Vattikuti Urology Institute, under the direction of Mani Menon, M.D., is the first in the country to perform surgery using a robotic system for the treatment of prostate cancer. It performs the first outpatient robotic prostatectomy.

That same year, Henry Ford doctors become the first in the state to use gene therapy for the treatment of brain tumors.

2005: Scott Dulchavsky, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the department of Surgery at Henry Ford Hospital, expands uses for ultrasound technology for physicians and non-medical personnel that can be used on Earth and in outer space. The ultrasound procedures can be used as an accurate diagnostic tool when coupled with the Internet, a telephone or wireless transmission of ultrasound images to experts at a location remote from the patient in rural areas

That same year, Henry Ford Medical Group begin using e-prescribing to cut prescription costs and improve quality. HFMG physicians now write more than 20,000 electronic prescriptions weekly, helping improve their overall generic use rate by 7.3 percent.

2008: Henry Ford is the first hospital in southeastern Michigan to perform a new, minimally invasive procedure for back pain that spares the nerves from being nicked and back muscles from being cut.

2010: Henry Ford performs Michigan’s first intestine transplant. The composite multivisceral transplant procedure included transplant of the patient’s small bowel, stomach and pancreas.

2011: Henry Ford Health System receives the 2011 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. This award is the nation’s highest Presidential honor for performance excellence through innovation, improvement and visionary leadership. One of only four organizations received this award in 2011; Henry Ford was the only Michigan-based recipient

Henry Ford Hospital History.