Grady Stroke Center Adds Outpatient Area

Bernie Marcus speaks with Michael Frankel (center), the chief of neurology and medical director of the Marcus Stroke & Neuroscience Center, and Raul Nogueira, the director of the center’s neuroendovascular division, after a ceremony to open an outpatient center as an expansion of the stroke center at Grady Memorial Hospital on June 26. By centralizing diagnosis and treatment functions, the new outpatient center enables Grady to serve more neurological patients through a multidisciplinary approach with better coordination. It’s the first phase of a project to expand the Marcus Stroke & Neuroscience Center’s capacity to treat patients and conduct research.

“This is like the Home Depot of stroke centers: It has everything; it does everything,” Marcus said. “More importantly, if it weren’t for Home Depot, we wouldn’t have this place today.”

Marcus said it was an easy sell when Pete Correll first solicited him several years ago to finance a stroke center at Grady because the need was clear and because Marcus had seen the fatal effects of a stroke on his chief financial officer when he ran a company in California years ago.

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“If somebody — my family, my friends, my associates at Home Depot — anybody had a stroke, where would they go? And the answer was nobody really treated it well. Nobody had the equipment. Nobody had the facilities they needed,” Marcus said. Now Grady has the best of the best in people, equipment and facilities for neuroscience and is continuing to get better, he told a crowd that included such Jewish leaders as Eliot Arnovitz, Lisa Brill, Renay Blumenthal and mayoral candidate John Eaves.