Florida Hospital Expands Nicholson Center for Surgical Advancement

CELEBRATION—Last month, Florida Hospital administrators led a hardhat tour through the $35 million expansion project that will house the nation’s largest and most comprehensive medical education center of its kind: The Nicholson Center for Surgical Advancement (NCSA).

The high-tech global surgical training center, currently housed in 5,000 square feet of space embedded on the Florida Hospital Celebration Health campus since May 2001, is expanding to a 54,000-square-foot freestanding facility located across the street. In the last decade, more than 43,000 surgeons have been trained at the Florida Hospital system-wide Nicholson Center. More than 8,000 physicians received NCSA training in 2010.

When the NCSA expansion project is completed this fall, the comprehensive facility will have a full conference center equipped to provide tele-mentoring and instructional surgical training for up to 500 physicians on site and to broadcast surgical training sessions to facilities around the world. With six daVinci robots today, dozens of surgical stations, two large team training operating rooms and a medical simulation and robotics center of excellence, the NCSA is expected to train more than 20,000 surgeons annually conducting minimally invasive surgical courses and events — robotic, laparoscopic and others.

 “When we celebrate our grand opening in October, with corporate offices moving in September, we’ll also be celebrating our 10-year anniversary,” said Sherrick “Rick” Wassel, system administrator of Florida Hospital’s NCSA. “We were one of the country’s first hospital systems to have such a comprehensive strategy. There are a handful of very well-respected institutions around the U.S., and a few outside the U.S., but most haven’t been around as long as we have. Some are embedded in academic medical centers to support their internal needs for training and education, including residency programs, fellowships and even undergraduate training. Our model, on the other hand, primarily focuses on the needs of the external marketplace globally.”

Wassel has played a key role shaping NCSA in the last five years. Since joining Florida Hospital in 1996, Wassel successfully helped develop and launch the medical staff model at Florida Hospital Celebration Health in 1998, the cornerstone of Walt Disney Company’s community of Celebration. A year later, he developed the hospital system’s first national executive health program that now serves many Fortune 500 companies’ senior executive teams nationally.

In 2003, Wassel was tapped as executive director for Florida Hospital’s Strategic Venture Group (SVG), which develops corporate alliances with the country’s leading medical device, biotech, pharmaceutical, life science and IT companies. The SVG works with global industry leaders’ executive teams to develop new strategic initiatives around innovation, research and development, education and training, and new business development. Then in January 2007, Wassel was named NCSA system administrator. 

“I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to come in and develop the strategic initiatives to take the institution to the next level,” said Wassel. “Our global marketplace has continued to expand. The number of doctors we train continues to increase. In 2007, we began looking at the idea of building a freestanding facility to support the growth and the market need, not just in the U.S., but also abroad. That led to this new 54,000-square-foot facility on the campus of Celebration Health.”

With more than 2,100 beds in Central Florida, Florida Hospital is the nation’s largest provider of Medicare services; the 8-hospital system admits more patients annually than any other U.S.-based hospital system.

Wassel works closely with regional organizations, including bioOrlando, the Economic Development Commission, Visit Orlando, and the National Center for Simulation, which itself focuses on medical modeling, simulation and training. He has also served on the Healthcare Advisory Board and the Science and High Tech Advisory Board for Florida’s Eighth Congressional District.

“The Central Florida community sees the advent of the expanded NCSA very positively,” he said. “We’ve been thoughtful to position the institution as a great asset. Orlando has historically been known for tourism, yet we’re becoming known as an emerging medical technology hub to compete at a national and global level.”  

When Orlando economic developers are competing for a high quality labor force, federal funding opportunities, investment dollars and recruiting companies, they’re promoting NCSA as one of the reasons to select a site in Central Florida, said Wassel.

“Overall, we’ve done a good job of promoting Orlando as the No. 1 tourist destination, but not as good a job promoting Orlando as the leading medical meeting and convention destination, ahead of other major cities like Las Vegas and Chicago,” he pointed out. “We have the opportunity to market the Central Florida Research Park, Health Village, Lake Nona Medical City and now the expanded NCSA at Celebration Health.”

Central Florida Research Park is home to the world's largest cluster for modeling, simulation and training, with more than 150 modeling, simulation and training companies, the University of Central Florida (UCF), and military’s leading simulation and training commands and agencies.

Florida Hospital is also collaborating with various institutes and UCF colleges—engineering, computer science and nursing, for example—and remains in dialogue on several projects involving the UCF College of Medicine and UCF’s Institute for Simulation and Training (IST), said Wassel, a UCF graduate.

Florida Hospital’s NCSA is also partnering on various initiatives with the National Center for Simulation (NCS), an association of primarily defense industry companies that was established in 1993 to support collaboration among the defense industry, government, and academia.

“The NCSA is one more global asset in the Central Florida marketplace,” said Wassel.

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