Why BIDMC

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a major teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is renowned for excellence in patient care, biomedical research, teaching and community service. Located in the heart of Boston’s medical community, it serves more than half a million patients annually from Boston and communities north, west and south of the city, as well as a national and international referral base.

Decades before Beth Israel and Deaconess hospitals came together as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in 1996, each was a national leader in healthcare with a long history of personalized patient care, community service, and a commitment to medical education. In 1896, as part of their missionary charter, Methodist deaconesses founded Deaconess Hospital to care for the city’s residents. In 1916, Beth Israel Hospital was established by Boston’s Jewish community to meet the needs of the growing immigrant population.

Today, the Medical Center is a tertiary/quaternary hospital with multidisciplinary cutting edge programs in many areas, but especially directed at the surgery of the future.

Patient Care

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a nonprofit healthcare institution providing care for patients of any race, creed, color, or nationality. It features:

  • state-of-the-art inpatient clinical center
  • 591 licensed beds, including 77 ICU beds
  • a full range of emergency services carried out in the modern Berenson Emergency Department, which provides a full range of emergency services, including a Level I Trauma Center and roof-top heliport. Contained within the 23,000 square foot facility are the latest technological advances in radiology, including dedicated CT scanning, bedside monitoring and registration, and enhanced communication systems. Everything about the facility has been designed to help clinicians provide the most sophisticated and rapid emergency and trauma care available in as pleasant a setting as possible. The Emergency Department serves more than 52,000 patient visits a year.
  • The Carl J. Shapiro Clinical Center is a nine-story, technologically advanced ambulatory care center that provides a warm, friendly location for surgeons and patients to interact in the outpatient setting. The majority of ambulatory surgery takes place in the Shapiro and connected Feldberg operating rooms.

Medical Milestones

  • The first administration of insulin in New England occurred at Deaconess Hospital in 1922.
  • The first implantable cardiac pacemaker was developed at Beth Israel Hospital in 1960.
  • The first successful liver transplant in New England was performed at the Deaconess Hospital in 1983.
  • The first baby conceived through in vitro fertilization in Massachusetts was delivered at Beth Israel Hospital in 1986.
  • The first evidence that abnormalities in the visual system of the brain could help explain the problems of people with dyslexia was discovered by Beth Israel Hospital researchers in 1991.
  • New England’s first minimally invasive coronary bypass surgery was performed at the Deaconess Hospital in 1995.
  • New England’s first living-donor liver transplant was performed at Beth Israel Deaconess in 1998.
  • First coronary bypass was performed using the Cohn Cardiac stabilizer, a device and method for coronary artery bypass surgery performed on the beating heart without the use of a heart-lung machine – developed at BIDMC.
  • In 2005, BIDMC became the first medical center in New England to offer the Cyberknife System – a revolutionary radiosurgical treatment for cancer patients.

Biomedical Research

Cutting-edge biomedical and clinical research is supported by grants from private foundations and government agencies.

  • Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is one of the top 4 independent teaching hospitals in the nation, in terms of biomedical research funding from theNational Institutes of Health.
  • The Harvard-Thorndike Laboratory, the nation’s oldest clinical research laboratory, has been located on this site since 1973.
  • Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center shares important clinical, research, and educational programs with institutions such as the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Joslin Diabetes Center, Boston’s Children’s Hospital, and the Joint Center for Radiation Therapy.

Medical Education

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is fully committed to educating medical students, surgical residents and postgraduate fellows, as well as to expanding the horizons of medical knowledge through research:

Undergraduate Medical Education

As one of Harvard Medical School’s major teaching sites, the Medical Center provides major core clerkships for the School’s third year students, and each department offers a wide variety of clinical electives for fourth year students.

Graduate Medical Education

In addition to its general surgery program, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center sponsors residencies in anesthesiology, medicine, emergency medicine, obstetrics/ gynecology, pathology, psychiatry, and radiology.

Postgraduate Medical Education

Beth Israel Deaconess sponsors clinical fellowships in cardiothoracic surgery, hand surgery, minimally invasive surgery, surgical critical care, organ transplantation, and vascular surgery in addition to a wide variety of medical specialty programs.

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