Long Beach Memorial Medical Center

Year Founded: 1907

Employees: 3,950

Licensed Beds: 760

1997

Occupancy Rate: 61%

Births: 5,013

Deaths: 687

Emergency Room Visits: 50,576

Surgical Operations

Inpatient: 9,211

Outpatient: 12,669

A subsidiary of Memorial Health Services, Long Beach Memorial Medical Center is the third largest private hospital on the West Coast. It’s also one of the few independent community hospitals that have managed to stay out of the red a feat hospital officials attribute to effective management and standardized clinical guidelines.

Those guidelines spell out specific procedures that are to be used in testing and treating patients. They do not always specify the lowest-cost course; the hospital requires, for example, that two physicians look at mammogram test results. But the guidelines have been found to be very cost-effective over the long term.

Last year, PacifiCare Health Systems awarded the hospital an unprecedented 10-year contract. Previously the HMO had limited its care provider contracts to only two years. This summer it received a Gold Star award from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the nation’s leading accrediting organization in health care.

Edvard Petterson