Burbank Hospital Lures Surgeon From St. Vincent

Dr. Taro Yokoyama, one of the leading heart surgeons in California, will direct a $5-million state-of-the-art cardiac surgery program at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank that will have new operating rooms and a pediatric intensive care unit built to his exact specifications.

In the past, most high-risk patients from the San Fernando Valley were referred to the County-USC or UCLA medical centers, Good Samaritan Hospital or Yokoyama’s team at St. Vincent Medical Center in downtown Los Angeles.

Among the operations Yokoyama performs are multiple valve replacements, pediatric heart surgeries and procedures to preserve tissue after heart attacks.

Yokoyama will continue operating at St. Vincent but has expanded his specialized medical team so the group can also perform surgery at St. Joseph Medical Center, said Vincent Guinan, president of St. Vincent.

St. Joseph administrator James Sauer said attracting Yokoyama will help the hospital achieve its goal of creating two “major centers of excellence,” one in cancer treatment and one in heart surgery.

Four heart surgeons are already on the staff at St. Joseph, performing about 125 operations a year at the 647-bed Catholic hospital, Sauer said.

“We’ll certainly double that volume and maybe triple it as the program gets going,” he said.

Yokoyama’s team of 10 surgeons and 15 anesthesiologists, surgical and intensive care nurses and physicians’ assistants will begin working at St. Joseph on Sept. 10.

After Yokoyama was selected by a hospital search committee to direct the heart surgery program six months ago, negotiations began to accommodate the surgeon’s requirements, Sauer said.

The hospital agreed to build two additional operating rooms, renovate its existing rooms and add a cardiac catheterization laboratory and a pediatric intensive care unit.

The hospital also will equip all the rooms with specialized instruments and will retrain staff members, he said.

Yokoyama also specified changes in the lighting, air-conditioning and humidity levels in the cardiac surgery and intensive care units, Sauer said.

“Essentially, we had to work with Dr. Yokoyama to produce the heart surgery environment he functions best in,” Sauer said.

Yokoyama, 56, received his medical degree and a Ph.D. in physiology from Okayama University Medical School in Japan.

He received further surgical training at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington and at County-USC Medical Center before becoming a kidney transplantation specialist at Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia.

His reputation as a cardiac surgeon was achieved at St. Vincent Medical Center, beginning in 1975.

In 1989, he and his team performed 750 open-heart surgeries, nearly five times the number required of members of the American College of Surgeons.

The team’s 3% mortality rate is considerably below the 5% statewide average, despite the complexity of the cases the team accepts, state health statistics show.

A spokeswoman at the Los Angeles chapter of the American Heart Assn. said Yokoyama and his team are “very well-known, and very highly respected.”

Yokoyama was in surgery and could not be reached for comment.