Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General or MGH) is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School and a biomedical research facility located in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It is the third oldest general hospital in the United States. With Brigham and Women’s Hospital, it is one of the two founding members of Partners HealthCare, the largest healthcare provider in Massachusetts. Massachusetts General Hospital conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the world, with an annual research budget of more than $900 million. It is currently ranked as the #3 hospital in the United States by U.S. News & World Report.
Founded in 1811, the original hospital was designed by the famous American architect Charles Bulfinch. It is the third-oldest general hospital in the United States; only Pennsylvania Hospital (1751) and NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital’s predecessor New York Hospital (1771) are older. John Warren, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at Harvard Medical School, spearheaded the move of the medical school to Boston. Warren’s son, John Collins Warren, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh Medical School, along with James Jackson, led the efforts to start the Massachusetts General Hospital, which was initially proposed in 1810 by Rev. John Bartlett, the Chaplain of the Almshouse in Boston. Because all those who had sufficient money were cared for at home, Massachusetts General Hospital, like most hospitals that were founded in the 19th century, was intended to care for the poor. During the mid-to-late 19th century, Harvard Medical School was located adjacent to Massachusetts General Hospital.
The hospital’s work with developing specialized computer software systems for medical use in the 1960s led to the development of the MUMPS programming language, which stands for “Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System,” an important programming language and data-base system heavily used in medical applications such as patient records and billing. A major patient database system called File Manager, which was developed by the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans’ Affairs), was created using this language.
The main MGH campus is located at 55 Fruit Street in Boston, Massachusetts. It has expanded into an area formerly known as the West End, adjacent to the Charles River and Beacon Hill. The hospital handles around 1.5 million outpatient visits each year at its main campus, as well as its seven satellite facilities in Boston at Back Bay, Charlestown, Chelsea, Everett, Revere, Waltham and Danvers. With more than 25,000 employees, the hospital is the largest non-governmental employer in Boston.
The hospital has 1,011 beds and admits around 50,000 patients each year. The surgical staff performs over 34,000 operations yearly. The obstetrics service handles over 3,800 births each year. The Massachusetts General Hospital Trauma Center is the oldest and largest American College of Surgeons-verified Level One Trauma Center in New England, evaluating and treating over 2600 trauma patients per year.
The MGH reports it conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of over $900 million in Fiscal 2017. The Mass General Research Institute was launched in 2014 to serve as a front door for the hospital’s research enterprise. Research at Mass General takes place in over 30 departments, centers and institutions and covers many areas including AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, regenerative medicine, transplantation biology and photomedicine.
Massachusetts General Hospital is affiliated with Harvard Medical School and is its original teaching hospital. Together they form an academic health science center. In February 2009, the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Institute of immunology was founded to bolster research into creating vaccines and other therapies for acquired immune system conditions, chiefly AIDS. It was made possible by a $100 million gift over ten years, and represents the largest single donation made to MGH. The Recovery Research Institute, created in 2013, is part of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry. In 2015, MGH Home Base Program became a founding partner of the Warrior Care Network heath system focused on treating posttramatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans, along with partners Emory Healthcare, Rush University Medical Center, UCLA Health and Wounded Warrior Project.
Though it has its own chief of psychiatry and top ranking department, MGH is closely affiliated with nearby McLean Hospital, a psychiatric hospital also affiliated with Harvard Medical School.
A former MGH physician filed a lawsuit under seal in May 2015 alleging that at least five orthopedic surgeons endangered patient safety by keeping them under anesthesia longer than necessary while the surgeons performed simultaneous surgeries. Dr. Lisa Wollman refiled the lawsuit in June 2017, citing concerns that the hospital was driven by economic benefit and keeping patients unaware of the practice of concurrent surgeries. Wollman’s attorney claimed that Medicare and Medicaid were being defrauded because they require that the surgeons must be present for all “critical portions” of the surgery in order to be compensated.
The hospital released a statement defending the use of overlapping surgeries: “The MGH continues to believe that its practices comply with all applicable laws and regulations, and the hospital will defend the claims accordingly.
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