Northwestern Memorial Hospital


Northwestern Memorial Hospital is a nationally ranked academic medical center located in the Streeterville neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship campus for Northwestern Medicine and the primary teaching hospital for the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Affiliated institutions also located on campus include the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital with Level I pediatric trauma care and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, a leader in physical medicine and rehabilitation.
Northwestern Memorial provides a total of 894 inpatient beds and encompasses more than 3 million square feet of medical buildings within the Northwestern University Chicago campus in the Streeterville neighborhood downtown. Nearly every medical specialty is represented by over 1,900 physicians on the medical staff at Northwestern Memorial who also carry faculty appointments with Feinberg School of Medicine. As of 2018, total hospital-based research funding topped $484 million placing Northwestern in the top 15 for the National Institutes of Health ranking among all American Medical Schools. The hospital's endowment reached $264 million as of 2020.
In 2020, U.S. News and World Report ranked Northwestern Memorial as the top hospital in both Chicago and Illinois for the ninth consecutive year and #10 in the nation for the second year. In the same report, Northwestern Memorial is nationally ranked in 11 adult specialties including #5 in Neurology & Neurosurgery.

History

Northwestern Memorial Hospital was founded on September 1, 1972, by the consolidation of Passavant Memorial and Wesley Memorial, two of Chicago's oldest hospitals. The merging of Passavant and Wesley created the Midwest’s largest private, nonprofit hospital at the time.
In 1914 philanthropist and former Northwestern University student James Deering made a $1 million gift to then Wesley Memorial in support of free care and to solidify the hospital’s relationship with Northwestern University’s medical school; today known as Feinberg School of Medicine. Wesley agreed to join Northwestern University on its new North Side campus in 1924, but funding was delayed until the 1930s. In the interim, Northwestern University offered Passavant Memorial an affiliation and site for a new hospital, which opened in 1929. Wesley Memorial’s new facility was completed in 1941, and over the next thirty years the two institutions, located across the street from each other in the Streeterville community, served as the primary teaching hospitals for Northwestern University Medical School.
Over the years, the hospitals began collaborating on a number of clinical services and teaching programs, setting in motion plans for a long-contemplated merger. The process accelerated with the 1966 establishment of the McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University that focused on joint purchasing, shared facilities, graduate medical education and the development of group practices to further joint planning efforts towards a unified medical center.
In 1994, construction began on a new 2 million square foot Northwestern Memorial facility on the block bordered by Fairbanks Court, St. Clair, Huron and Erie Streets. On May 1, 1999, the 17-story Feinberg Pavilion and 22-story Galter Pavilion opened and today serve as the flagship campus for Northwestern Medicine. Considered a model facility for healthcare providers, hundreds of local, national and international tour groups visit Northwestern Memorial Hospital each year.
The American College of Healthcare Architects recognized Northwestern Memorial for forward-thinking design as it was one of the first hospitals to dedicate private rooms to patients in the main Feinberg and Galter Pavilion buildings. To date, Northwestern Memorial's Feinberg and Galter Pavilion buildings make it the third tallest hospital in the United States and the eighth tallest hospital in the world. The neighboring Lurie Children's Hospital, also affiliated with Northwestern, is the second tallest hospital facility in the country.
The new Prentice Women's Hospital opened on October 20, 2007 on the hospital's northern campus border along Superior Street. This facility would replace the old Prentice Women's Hospital Building which later was demolished in September 2014 for new campus construction.
On October 12, 2015, Northwestern Memorial Hospital named Julie L. Creamer as its first female President. Creamer received her BSN from Marquette University and holds a Master of Science Degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Shortly after graduating from Marquette University she began her nursing career at Northwestern and became a part of the hospital’s management team in 1996. She was instrumental in the planning and construction of the new hospital which opened in 1999.
With construction beginning in 2015 and completed in 2019, the Simpson Querrey Biomedical Research Center is a 600,000 square foot building on the hospital campus that houses laboratories dedicated to biomedical research. Future expansion of the 14-story building will bring total dedicated research square footage to roughly 1.2 million. The project was partially funded and eventually named after Louis Simpson and his wife, Kimberly Querrey who made a $92 million donation to the center.

Research

In partnership with the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, more than 4,500 clinical trials and studies are conducted each year with over 50,000 patients and volunteers participating. As of 2019, Feinberg generates roughly 70% of all research dollars at Northwestern.
Research awards for Feinberg totaled $534 million in fiscal year 2019. Current clinical trials are being conducted in the following areas: AIDS, cancer, cardiovascular disease, dermatology, diabetes, gastroenterology, genetics, mental health, neurology, obstetrics and gynecology, rheumatology & immunology, sleep disorders, organ transplantation, and weight loss.
The Simpson Querrey Biomedical Research Center opened in 2019 and is expected to produce over $1.5 billion in new federal medical research funding in the center's first 10 years. The facility, located on Northwestern Memorial's downtown Chicago campus, is also the world's tallest medical research building.

Reputation

Northwestern Memorial Hospital is frequently ranked as a top hospital in both Chicago and Illinois as well as in the top 15 placement nationally.
Northwestern Memorial is also ranked among the best in the nation in 12 specialties: neurology and neurosurgery ; orthopaedics ; diabetes and endocrinology ; urology ; ; gynecology ; geriatrics ; heart and cardiac surgery ; pulmonology ; cancer ; nephrology ; ear, nose and throat ; and as high-performing in rheumatology and ophthalmology.

CommunityHealth Partnership

Northwestern Memorial is a partner with CommunityHealth in Chicago and provides healthcare through medical volunteers who participate in a residency program at the center’s two sites in the West Town and Englewood neighborhoods. Each year the program provides more than 20,000 medical and dental visits for more than 10,500 patients.

Notable deaths