Health Care

If you have to get sick somewhere, the Cincinnati neighborhoods of Clifton, Mount Auburn, and Avondale would be good places to do it. The area’s biggest hospitals and a cluster of smaller or specialty hospitals are located in these neighborhoods north of downtown, an area collectively known as “Pill Hill” in the health-care community. There are plenty of other suburban and rural hospitals, including affiliates of the Pill Hill hospitals, which serve the rest of the Greater Cincinnati area.

Cincinnati hospitals are well known regionally and nationally for quality care. University Hospital’s two Air Care helicopters, for example, provide emergency service as far as 150 miles away. Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital Medical Center is among the largest and busiest children’s hospitals in the United States. And Cincinnati’s Shriners Hospital for Children is one of only a few in the country and provides treatment for severely burned children, mostly free of charge.

Cincinnati also has a reputation as a cradle of medical research. Albert Sabin developed the first oral polio vaccine at the University of Cincinnati and Children’s Hospital. Henry Heimlich was chief of surgery at Jewish Hospital when he developed his famous maneuver and started an institute in Cincinnati to help fund other research. The first medical laser laboratory was established by Leon Goldman at Children’s Hospital, and the first argon laser surgery in the United States was done here. The University of Cincinnati opened the Genome Research Institute after obtaining hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants. Some 450 researchers at the 360,000-square-foot biotech facility in Reading hunt for better treatments for heart disease, obesity, cancer, and other ills.

All these combined means Cincinnati is a major destination for medical tourists––that is, out-of-town patients visiting here for medical treatment. Cincinnati’s hospitals injected almost $400 million into the local economy during 2007, according to Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce estimates.

The consolidations that are happening here and elsewhere as a part of the managed-care philosophy are helping fuel the “centers of excellence” concept, in which each hospital concentrates on an area or areas of expertise. Of course, which hospitals are “centers of excellence” in which specialties remains a point of debate. Several Pill Hill hospitals lay claim to that title in such areas as cardiac and cancer care and even rehabilitation. The descriptions below note areas where hospitals have identified their strengths.