Dr.
Nils August Johanson founded Swedish Hospital in 1910 as Seattle's first modern nonprofit medical facility. Dr. Johanson was an immigrant from
Sweden and was the father-in-law of Seattle businessman
Elmer Nordstrom. After returning from attending medical school at the
University of Denver, he was disappointed by the facilities and the thinking in Seattle's hospitals, particularly those related to
germ control and surgical techniques. The board of trustees for Swedish Hospital were historically of Swedish descent until the election of two non-Swedish-American doctors in 1968. Swedish originally started with its First Hill campus, but began to expand its network by merging with
Seattle General Hospital (founded 1895) and the Doctors Hospital (founded 1944) in May 1978. Swedish then expanded outside First Hill when it purchased Ballard Community Hospital in the Seattle district of
Ballard (founded 1928) on July 1, 1992. After a decade, Swedish began expanding outside Seattle and King County with its lease of Stevens Hospital (founded January 26, 1964)
Edmonds on September 1, 2010, and the opening of a brand-new campus in
Issaquah in July, 2011. In 2009, Swedish partnered with
The Polyclinic to implement electronic health records, and in 2012, it became a division of Providence Health & Services. In 2014, Swedish formed new partnerships with
Group Health Cooperative and
Pacific Medical Centers. Catholic affiliation Swedish Health Services is owned by the Catholic healthcare system
Providence Health & Services. In 2012, Swedish and Providence announced that the two hospital systems would form an alliance, with both organizations citing their own staffing challenges caused by budget shortfalls as the reason. Swedish emphasized that it would remain a nonreligious organization, although the formerly independent Swedish would become a division of Providence. Around the same time of the merger announcement, Swedish also stopped performing
elective abortions “out of respect for the affiliation,” and offered to instead underwrite a
Planned Parenthood center adjacent to its Seattle hospital. During the
2022 abortion protests, Swedish issued a statement clarifying that it is not bound by the
Conference of Catholic Bishops’s Ethical and Religious Directives and would continue to offer
birth control. It also required workers infected with coronavirus to exhaust sick and vacation time before granting them 80 hours of emergency time off. Swedish Medical Center is one of only seven hospitals in Washington that can perform
extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and accepted patients with extreme cases of
COVID-19 during the pandemic. The hospital is performing clinical trials of
Tocilizumab to counter the effects of a
cytokine storm, an extreme immune reaction that occurs in the most extreme cases of COVID-19. ==Notable staff==