With 2025 coming to close, the NorthShore Hospitals Foundation team is delighted to reflect on and share with you program highlights, news stories and milestones from this year. All of these are made possible through the support of our generous donors! Together, we lived our mission to help everyone in our communities be their best.
Healthcare on the road
Endeavor Health’s NorthShore hospitals bring world-class care and innovation at a local level. As nonprofit, community hospitals, we rely on donor funding to expand and strengthen our community-based programs that meet the unique needs of our neighbors. The following programs are excellent examples of how community hospitals make an impact beyond their walls.
The Grainger Center for Simulation and Innovation’s interactive “Simbulance” — a custom-built ambulance equipped for immersive simulation and hands-on learning — has been spotted around the region this year. From Touch-a-Truck events for families to high school class experiences, the Simbulance brings training and education into the community, inspiring our younger neighbors to pursue careers in healthcare. The Simbulance’s learning-and-outreach tools on wheels offer everything from hands-on CPR, stroke and EpiPen education to EMS training by our local fire and emergency departments.
Another donor-funded program – the Physician Response Vehicle (PRV) program — also brings NorthShore hospitals’ expertise into the community. The rapid-response PRV allows a doctor respond to emergencies alongside firefighters and paramedics, providing advanced medical care at the scene.
“This program strengthens the overall care continuum — from 911 interactions to hospital discharge — adding a physician-level resource to prehospital patient care,” said Ben Feinzimer, DO, MS, EMS Medical Director for Illinois EMS Region X at Endeavor Health Highland Park Hospital, who developed the program.
Groundbreaking research and personalized medicine
The Endeavor Health Research Institute has conducted more than 550 active clinical trials and more than 700 clinical research studies in areas ranging from cardiology, oncology, genetics and infectious disease to patient quality, safety and experience. We’re also proud to be home to the largest primary care-embedded clinical genomics program in the nation.
While government and private grants initially fund these projects, individual donor support provides the additional funding required to take this vital work even further and bring the findings more immediately to our patients.
Endeavor Health is among the first healthcare providers in the nation to offer groundbreaking clinical-grade polygenic risk score (PRS) testing for a broad range of conditions. To offer the PRS to patients, Endeavor Health is partnering with GenomicMD, a CLIA-certified organization dedicated to personalizing healthcare through precision medicine and to providing patients and their physicians with an assessment of lifetime genomic risk for cardiovascular, cardiometabolic, neurologic, oncologic, urologic and other common diseases.
The PRS testing perfectly complements our comprehensive Personalized Medicine Program, an area of support that’s of particular interest to our donors. In fact, the newly created Endeavor Health Davis Family Center for Preventive Genomics, made possible by a generous philanthropic gift from Bill and Karen Davis, will expand this commitment to personalized medicine by providing patients with more proactive information about their genomics so prevention and screening care plans can be tailored to their precise needs.
Celebrating the first anniversary of the Endeavor Health CVI
The Endeavor Health Cardiovascular Institute (CVI) pavilion at Glenbrook Hospital — a 170,000-square-foot facility in Glenview, Illinois that provides comprehensive heart care in a single landing place, from diagnosis to treatment — celebrated its one-year anniversary on May 13, 2025.
Since opening its doors to patient care, the CVI has performed nearly 8,000 cardiovascular patient cases ranging from cardiac catheterizations to electrophysiology cases to vascular and cardiac surgeries. In addition to the considerable volume of patient cases, the CVI also is home to ongoing clinical research trials, educational symposiums and some of the first cardiovascular surgical innovations.
Most importantly, the CVI has become a hub for collaboration, bringing together cardiovascular experts, researchers and patient care teams to the benefit of the community.
Each of the highlights shared here is truly made possible through donor support. Gifts of every size directly provide flexible, reliable funding to our leaders and experts to propel their work further.
As a nonprofit hospital system, Endeavor Health relies on donor support to bolster our patient support services, new research projects and lifesaving clinical procedures. We are truly powered by giving!
NorthShore Hospitals Foundation is the local philanthropy office that raises donor support for programs and clinical departments at Endeavor Health’s NorthShore hospitals — Evanston, Glenbrook, Highland Park and Skokie — and for the Endeavor Health Research Institute.
Want to learn more about how you can make an impact as a donor? Reach out to Kaitlin Czurylo, Director of Annual Giving, at 224.364.7607 or kczurylo@northshore.org. She’s here to answer questions and eager to discuss everything happening at Endeavor Health’s NorthShore hospitals.
