Put Irvine and Hoag down as a good match.
Good enough to prompt a major expansion for 4-year-old Hoag Hospital Irvine.
Hoag Health Center Irvine will open in the spring of 2016 with three 50,000-square-foot buildings and a wide range of services, most of which are done in outpatient settings. It’s being built across the street from Hoag Irvine at the intersection of Alton Parkway and Sand Canyon Avenue.
“We’ve listened to [the community], and it’s obvious that they want more of Hoag—they want more of Hoag-branded services in this zip code,” said Marcy Brown, executive director of Hoag Irvine, which is part of Newport Beach-based Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian.
Irvine residents “don’t want to have to travel down the 55 [Costa Mesa Freeway] to have access to Hoag-branded specialists, Hoag-branded cancer care, Hoag-branded outpatient surgery. So that’s our strategic plan,” Brown said in an interview last week.
Development costs for Hoag Health Center Irvine, which Brown also refers to as a “healthcare village,” is conservatively estimated at $50 million.
“We believe this center is really going to change the healthcare demographics of Irvine and South County,” Brown said. “They’ll experience coordinated care and eloquent handoffs between their primary care physicians and the specialists who will be caring for them.”
Services
Outpatient surgery, cardiac care, neurology, cancer care, breast health, women’s pelvic health services, gastroenterology, outpatient diagnostics, physical therapy, radiation therapy, and an outpatient chemical dependency program are on the “Hoag-branded” service menu for the new center.
Doctors’ offices are slated for the second floor of two of the buildings.
The third building will be a location of the Hoag Family Cancer Institute—including diagnostic, therapeutic services, and a research team.
“Those patients who want access to the latest in clinical trials and research trials will be able to access that here in this building,” Brown said.
Hoag Health Center Irvine also is set to include five operating rooms, more than 20 infusion chairs for cancer chemotherapy, a full-service medical imaging center, an urgent care center run by Hoag Medical Group, and a medical laboratory and pharmacy.
Brown said she could not give an exact number of jobs the new center will create because some existing services will be moved from Hoag Hospital Irvine or the 10-story medical office building adjacent to the facility.
Hoag Memorial said in November that it agreed to lease the bulk of what was known as Shady Creek Medical Center. The center is one of the largest medical office developments to take shape in Orange County in recent years.
San Diego-based Pacific Medical Buildings LLC is the project’s developer.
Trend
Hospital operators such as Hoag have taken up the trend of moving outpatient services from their core buildings in bids to improve efficiency and lower costs.
“It’s an attractive strategy across the country for the healthiest operators,” Garth Hogan, executive managing director for real estate brokerage Newmark Grubb Knight Frank’s global healthcare services office in Newport Beach, told the Business Journal in November. Hogan and colleague John Scruggs represented Pacific Medical in the lease, and Kevin Leonard of the Newport Beach office of HealthWest Realty Advisors represented Hoag.
Shady Creek had seen a few false starts before Hoag arrived—Pacific Medical a few years ago took over the project, which is on some 40 acres, from another developer that could not start construction due to the effects of the last recession.
Brown said that doctors who lease space in the center are required to be affiliated with Irvine-based St. Joseph Hoag Healthcare, the integrated regional network that Hoag has teamed up on with St. Joseph Health, the Irvine-based hospital operator.
“Those physicians that practice and those services that will be delivered in this Hoag health center will support the St. Joseph Hoag health network. We don’t want specialists and Hoag-affiliated physicians practicing here that don’t support [the network],” Brown said, adding that doctors must accept contracts from the St. Joseph Heritage Healthcare medical group, among other things.
Doctors also will be required to participate in Hoag’s electronic medical records system if they want to lease space in the center.
Power lines have been placed underground by Rosemead-based Edison International’s Southern California Edison, which owns the land that Hoag Health Center will be built on. Edison signed a long-term ground lease with Pacific Medical.
