With 473 beds, the medical center is the offspring of the fabled Ochsner Clinic, founded by surgeon Alton Ochsner in the 1942. It is the flagship of Ochsner Health System, which owns eight hospitals after purchasing 165-bed NorthShore Regional Medical Center in Slidell, La., in April 2010. To reduce crowding, the medical center’s ED created a protocol called QTrack separating out the sickest patients and speeding up care for the others. Ochsner is one of the largest non-university based physician training centers in the nation, with more than 200 medical residents and more than 300 medical residents from affiliated programs. Among many distinctions, it won the Emergency Medicine Excellence Award and Kidney Transplant Excellence Award from HealthGrades in 2010.