Health-care giants compete for business

Mecklenburg County is home to two large and competitive health-care providers – Carolinas HealthCare System and Presbyterian Healthcare. They own multiple acute-care hospitals and doctors' practices from the N.C. mountains to the S.C. coast.

In addition to their flagship hospitals in central Charlotte – Carolinas Medical Center and Presbyterian Hospital – the two systems operate smaller, satellite hospitals that circle the city in the towns of Pineville, Matthews, Huntersville, Concord, Monroe and Lincolnton.

Charlotte is the largest city in the country without a four-year medical school, but it aspires to have one. CMC has been working with UNC Chapel Hill medical school to establish a regional campus in Charlotte, but the project is on hold because of declining state revenues.

The plan is to send 50 students from UNC to Carolinas Medical Center for their third and fourth years of medical school, when the focus is on practical experience in the hospital instead of the classroom.

Even without a med school, CMC has been training future doctors since the 1940s. Today, its residency program trains more than 200 medical-school graduates in 15 specialties. CMC also hosts UNC medical students for month-long rotations in clinical settings. And it operates the Carolinas College of Health Sciences with training programs in nursing and medical, surgical and radiologic technology.

Presbyterian has a long history of training nurses. Its 100-year-old school of nursing merged in 2004 with the nursing school at Queens University of Charlotte, creating the largest of six nursing schools in Mecklenburg County. Others are at UNC Charlotte, Central Piedmont Community College, Gardner-Webb University and Carolinas Medical Center-Mercy.

Carolinas HealthCare is one the nation's largest hospital systems, a public not-for-profit entity created by state law.

CMC, the main hospital in Dilworth, offers the region's only Level 1 trauma center, where accident victims often arrive via medical helicopter, and the region's only transplant program – heart, kidney, liver and pancreas.

Two years ago, CMC opened Levine Children's Hospital, the largest children's hospital between Atlanta and Washington, with a distinctive 11-story glass exterior that changes colors with the sunlight.

Presbyterian HealthCare is a private, not-for-profit system, part of a large network of hospitals and physician practices owned by Novant Health, based in Winston-Salem.

Its main Charlotte hospital in the Elizabeth neighborhood offers a children's hospital, a women's and infants' care center, and centers for the care of cancer and heart disease.

“How lucky we are in Charlotte to have two world-class, state-of-the-art health-care systems,” said Dr. Mark Mogul, a cancer specialist at Presbyterian.

He came to Charlotte in 2003 from the University of Florida and was “blown away” by the variety of clinical trials available to cancer patients in a non-medical school setting.

Dr. Leonard Feld, who left New Jersey to become chairman of pediatrics at Levine Children's Hospital in 2006, is also impressed by the “strong medical community with a great deal of depth and capability.”

“People moving here can feel very comforted, they'll get first-rate care in this community … (And) you can have it close to home.”

Karen Garloch is the Observer's medical writer. 704-358-5078 .

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