With a one million dollar grant from The Jim Moran Foundation in commemoration of its 20th anniversary, Holy Cross Health will establish the Holy Cross Family Health Center to improve the quality of life for underserved youth, individuals and families in Broward County.

The Holy Cross Family Health Center will be the preeminent provider of education, prevention, early intervention, wrap-a-round social and behavioral health services, OB/GYN access and treatment of primary care and infectious disease services through innovative approaches in a caring, compassionate environment.
 
The Holy Cross Family Health Center will offer healthcare services that are an essential component of healthcare. Community partners also will provide on-site mental health services to patients and families.
 
The grant allows Holy Cross Health to renovate the first floor of the Holy Cross building at 5601 N. Dixie Highway that will house the Center. Those modifications will include exam rooms, telehealth consult areas, counseling rooms, group counseling and education rooms, food pantry, clothing closet, storage, restrooms, (shared) community resource rooms, on-site access to pharmaceutical services and waiting areas.
 
Expected completion of the Holy Cross Family Health Center is in summer of 2022.


Cleveland Clinic Martin Health welcomes board-certified medical hematologist oncologist Houssein Sater, MD. As a physician scientist, Dr. Sater will lead cancer research at Martin Health and work alongside Cleveland Clinic Florida researchers to advance cancer immunotherapy and provide more personalized treatment options for patients with cancer.

Dr. Sater earned his medical degree at Lebanese University in Beirut. He completed residency programs at National Institute of Pathology in Beirut and at Northwell University Hospital in New York. He completed fellowship training programs at Jules Bordet Institute in Belgium and at Georgia Cancer Center in Augusta.
 
Prior to joining Martin Health, Dr. Sater has worked at National Cancer Institute, where he served on faculty as an assistant research physician in medical oncology. 


Cleveland Clinic’s Weston Hospital has performed its first living donor liver transplant, in which a daughter donated a portion of her liver to her mother who had been battling complicated liver disease for several years.

The donor and recipient surgeries were performed in Weston by a team of surgeons from Cleveland Clinic Weston and Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which has one of the nation’s largest living donor liver transplant programs.
 
On May 10, 2021, Cristiano Quintini, M.D., director of Liver Transplantation at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, and Weston Hospital transplant surgeons Samer Ebaid, M.D., Ph.D., and Phoenix Vuong, M.D., removed 60 percent of the right lobe of 38 year-old Heidy Lima’s liver through an abdominal incision.
 
In an operating room nearby, Koji Hashimoto, M.D., Ph.D., director of Living Donor Liver Transplantation at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, Antonio Pinna, M.D., director of Cleveland Clinic Weston’s Abdominal Transplant Center, and Weston transplant surgeon Sidharth Sharma, M.D., successfully transplanted the donated portion of Lima’s liver to her mother, 60-year old Iris Blanco.
 
“The collaboration between our transplant team in Weston and our colleagues in Ohio has been exceptional, allowing us to take this step forward and meet a critical need for living donor liver transplant services in South Florida, “said Conor Delaney, M.D., Ph.D., CEO and President of Cleveland Clinic’s Florida region. “As an integrated healthcare delivery system, we continue to expand our ability to provide multidisciplinary, complex care and improve the quality of life for our patients and their families.”
 


The Florida Chapter of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) has presented the 2021 Raymond H. Alexander, MD, FACS, award to Steven Wexner, M.D., Ph.D., FACS, of Cleveland Clinic’s Weston Hospital in Weston, FL. The award recognizes a chapter member for outstanding dedication to the medical profession in the field of surgery. It is the highest award given by the organization.

Dr. Wexner is the Chairman of the Department of Colorectal Surgery which is part of Cleveland Clinic Weston Hospital’s Digestive Disease and Surgery Center. He is also the former Director of the Digestive Disease Surgery Center and the former Chief of Staff for Cleveland Clinic Florida. He hopes this award inspires young surgeons to continue to demonstrate excellence in innovation, research, education, and a commitment to optimizing patient outcomes.
 
Dr. Wexner is also a past president of the American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons, as well as of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, Vice-Chair of the Board of Regents of the ACS, and Chair of the ACS CoC NAPRC.


Palm Health Foundation, Palm Beach County’s community foundation for health, has provided a grant to the Promise Fund of Florida to increase access to affordable breast and cervical health care services to women in need. The funding will support the hire of a “provider network recruiter” who will identify new and existing community resources to expand Promise Fund of Florida’s Continuum of Care Model throughout Palm Beach County to increase health equity and help reach its goal of ensuring all women, regardless of income, receive affordable, timely, high quality, breast and cervical screenings, diagnostics, treatment, and follow up care. Palm Health Foundation joins Quantum Foundation in jointly funding this new position.

The Promise Fund of Florida was co-founded by Nancy G. Brinker, founder of Susan G. Komen, Julie Fisher Cummings, and Laurie Silvers, three women who have spent decades working to improve quality of life for men and women of all socioeconomic backgrounds in many different areas of need. They founded the Promise Fund of Florida to fill the gaps in access to healthcare and help those in need in Palm Beach County to reduce the number of deaths due to late-stage breast and cervical cancer. Florida ranks last in the United States for the number of women under 65 who have insurance, magnifying their vulnerability to death from cancer because the lack of insurance delays diagnosis and treatment with catastrophic results.
 
The provider network recruiter will play a critical role in developing partnerships closest to target populations where multiple barriers to care exist, including transportation, language, finding childcare and taking time off from work. The Promise Fund has mapped imaging and screening facilities in Palm Beach County to identify gaps and serve as a blueprint for where the provider network recruiter will create partnerships for affordable cancer care services with physicians, clinics, hospitals, and other providers for Promise Fund participants. The goal is to identify a minimum of 15 health care providers to serve 300 or more women.