16
August
2017
|
13:01 PM
America/New_York

Zubizarreta House welcomes its first patient

Kevin-Kilgore-Kim-Erisman-Anderson

Kim Anderson-Erisman, PhD, and her husband moved into the beautiful new Zubizarreta House this month as she prepared for an innovative surgery that will allow her to use her hands and trunk for the first time since she was injured in a car crash at the age of 17.

“I’ve waited 28 years for this,” Kim says. The just-completed house, located next to our Old Brooklyn Health Center, is a home away from home for out-of-town spinal cord patients who receive groundbreaking electrical stimulation treatment at MetroHealth. Zubizarreta House has a bed-and-breakfast feel with five suites that offer separate bedrooms for patients and caregivers and the extras those with spinal cord injuries often need, including roll-in showers, motorized lifts and countertops at various heights.

The house was the idea of Kevin Kilgore, PhD, a biomedical engineer and researcher at MetroHealth, who often faced the challenge of finding accessible hotel rooms for paralyzed patients. 

He won $100,000 toward the project during MetroHealth’s Think Tank competition in 2015. One Think Tank judge, former Hyland Software CIO Miguel Zubizarreta, was so taken with the idea he donated more than $1.6 million to make sure the 7,000-square-foot home was completed.