Laura Lavoie, Director of Philanthropy at Rady Children's Hospital, with Program Chair Scott MacDonald
Examples of 3D models created at Rady Children's 3DVIP lab
Laura Lavoie, Director of Philanthropy for Rady Children’s Hospital, was our speaker at the August 2, 2018 meeting. Laura has a personal connection with the hospital- her son Luke, who’s now 6, spent the first 37 days of his life in a Rady-administered NICU at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. She now has the opportunity to help give back to the hospital system that gave her and her son so much.
Rady Children’s began in 1954 as Children’s Hospital of San Diego, a 12 bed community polio hospital. In the nearly 65 years since, the hospital grew to a 550 bed facility that is one of the biggest children’s hospitals by volume. Last year they treated over 20,000 inpatients and almost 300,000 outpatients. Through its partnerships with pediatric medical groups and referrals, medical services for over 90% of children treated in San Diego county were in some way connected to Rady Children’s.
The hospital is ranked in the top 10 for multiple specialties and has faculty who are affiliated with top research institutions in the area, including UCSD. In her presentation Laura focused on four programs that are supported in part by community donations.
The 3D Visualization, Innovation and Prototyping (3DVIP) lab uses 3D printing to create models and prints based on medical imaging that allows surgeons and other clinicians to hold in their hands a model of the organ they’ll be treating. Through these tactile models, clinicians can plan treatment strategies and also help patients and their parents visualize how they’ll be treated.
Faces for the Future (FACES), a four year academic and career development program, exposes students from Hoover and Crawford High Schools to career opportunities in healthcare. Through clinical rotations and shadowing staff at local agencies involved in healthcare delivery, FACES provides these students with mentors and with firsthand experience that will be critical to their future success. FACES is also helping to diversify the healthcare workforce by giving underserved students the skills and tools they need to enter training programs after they graduate high school.
Rady Children’s Philanthropy was also instrumental in obtaining funds needed to install NICVIEW cameras in their neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). These cameras are positioned above the isolettes and allow parents to see their newborns in real time by logging in to a secure online video feed. Parents value the ability to see their infants whenever they’re not able to be in the NICU itself- one family logged in more than 650 times in the first week of their child’s life.
Since its launch in 2016, the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Rady Children’s has sequenced the genomes of more than 1,000 patients. Sequencing of an entire genome once took weeks and cost millions. Rady patients now can receive results in just days at minimal cost. Of those patients whose genomes were sequenced at Rady, 35% received a diagnosis based on sequencing results (note that not all disease has a genetic foundation that can be detected by sequencing) and of those, the treatment plan for 70% changed course based on the sequencing findings.
Through these innovative programs, Rady Children’s stands as an invaluable resource not only for San Diego’s youngest residents, but also for children around the world who are referred to Rady Children’s for treatment. To learn more about how you can support Rady Children's programs, email Laura.