Swedish Medical Center


Swedish Medical Center is the largest nonprofit health provider in the greater Seattle area. It operates five hospital campuses ; ambulatory care centers in Redmond and Mill Creek; and Swedish Medical Group, a network of more than 100 primary-care and specialty clinics. It is affiliated with many other health care providers across the state of Washington. As of 2013 it has 8,886 employees and 6,023 credentialed physicians.

History

Dr. Nils August Johanson founded Swedish Medical Center in 1910 as Seattle's first modern nonprofit medical facility. Dr. Johanson was an immigrant from Sweden and was the father-in-law of Seattle businessman Elmer Nordstrom; the medical center's name pays tribute to Johanson's heritage. In 1932, Swedish opened the first cancer-care center west of the Mississippi. The board of trustees for Swedish Hospital were historically of Swedish descent until the election of two non-Swede doctors in 1968.
In 2009, Swedish partnered with The Polyclinic to implement electronic health records.
In 2012, Swedish became affiliated with Providence Health & Services. In 2014, Swedish formed new partnerships with Group Health Cooperative and Pacific Medical Centers.

COVID-19 pandemic

In 2020, administration at the hospital threatened to fire a physician for wearing personal protective equipment outside a patient care area during the COVID-19 pandemic. The hospital has since backed down. The hospital requires workers infected with coronavirus to exhaust sick and vacation time before they grant them 80 hours of emergency time off.
Swedish Medical Center is one of only two hospitals in Washington that can perform extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and so it accepted patients with the most extreme cases of COVID-19 during the pandemic. The hospital is performing clinical trials of Tocilizumab to counter the effects of a cytokine storm, an extreme immune reaction that occurs in the most extreme cases of COVID-19.