Kaiser Planning $48M Irvine Medical Complex
By VITA REED
Kaiser Permanente is spending $48 million to build a medical office building and specialty care center in Irvine.
Plans call for 107,000 square feet of space and four stories, including room for future expansion. It is the first facility on a parcel Kaiser has near the Irvine Regional Hospital and Medical Center at Sand Canyon Avenue and Alton Parkway in Irvine.
“This building was conceived some years ago,” said Judy White, a Kaiser Orange County administrator.
“We have a land agreement with the city of Irvine for 40 acres of land, 30 of which are usable,” she said.
Construction is set to start next month. Patients are expected at the building by June 2004.
Kaiser has hired the Irvine office of Baltimore-based Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. to build the Irvine facility. Whiting-Turner also did a Kaiser medical building in Brea.
The health plan, a unit of Oakland-based Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, is OC’s largest with about 343,000 local members.
South County’s demographics led to Kaiser’s decision to build in Irvine, White said.
“We wanted to begin building a presence (in South County),” she said. “We’ve had steady growth,we knew we needed services in South Orange County.”
The land first was slated for a Kaiser hospital. But White said the health plan has no immediate plans for another hospital. Kaiser is building a new hospital in Anaheim which will meet state earthquake standards and replace its aging 200-bed facility on Lakeview Avenue near the Riverside (91) Freeway.
Kaiser had to contract with other facilities to handle overflow patients because of enrollment growth. Irvine Regional Hospital and Medical Center, owned by Tenet Healthcare Corp. of Santa Barbara, takes some Kaiser patients, along with West Anaheim Medical Center.
Kaiser uses input from employers and housing developers, among other sources, to figure out where to expand, White said.
Service offerings at Sand Canyon will include outpatient and general surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, urology, cardiology and orthopedics. The health maintenance organization’s new complex also is set to include a pain clinic, radiology and X-ray services, a medical laboratory and a pharmacy.
Kaiser says it will to open what it calls a walk-in “UrgiCenter” to handle patients with urgent care conditions that require prompt attention but aren’t emergencies, White said. The UrgiCenter is set to be open seven days a week until 11 p.m., she said.
Kaiser plans to keep its existing Irvine office, which opened in 1991, and move more primary care physicians in it. That office is on Willard Road off Barranca Parkway.
As for the new building, Kaiser, which employs its own physicians, is planning to staff the new facility with 34 doctors and 100 nurses, technicians and others.
Kaiser also has big plans in Anaheim. Last year, the health plan bought a 15.5-acre site in Anaheim from Canada’s Cinram International Inc., a compact disc replicator, for $14.5 million last year. Kaiser is set to raze the existing buildings and erect a new hospital and patient-care complex there.
It’s planning to open the Anaheim complex’s first phase, including a surgical hospital and birthing center, in 2006. The second phase, including a 300-plus bed hospital, is set to open in 2011.
In other Kaiser building news, White said the health plan is “just about finished” with the second phase of its medical office complex at Harbor and MacArthur boulevards in Santa Ana, on the border of Costa Mesa. That phase, she said, will include Kaiser’s first UrgiCenter.
