Newport Beach-based Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian will soon take the official wraps off a philanthropy campaign with a working goal of raising at least $500 million by 2020.
“Hoag Promise, Our Campaign to Lead, Innovate and Transform” is the first comprehensive campaign in the hospital’s 63-year history. That means it seeks to go beyond the traditional hospital philanthropy model by raising funds for additions and enhancements to patient services in place of a focus on specific capital investments in buildings or equipment.
Hoag has already raised some $320 million during the campaign’s “quiet phase.” The total so far includes several large gifts, including $5 million from Peter and Ginny Ueberroth for an endowed executive medical director chair at Hoag Women’s Pavilion.
The couple has been a supporter of the hospital for years, with Ginny serving as a major fund raiser in an earlier campaign to get the pavilion built in the early 2000s.
More than $30 million is in hand to fund 11 endowed chairs that will aim to help Hoag expand and improve its services, including the Ueberroths’ gift and others from manufacturing entrepreneur Ron Simon and his wife Sandi, and Pam and Jim Muzzy, a co-founder of Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach.
Another former Pimco executive, Bill Thompson, joined with his wife, Nancy, to donate $5 million toward a new cardiovascular center.
And Julia and George Argyros have given $2.5 million through their family foundation for programs to enhance nursing care.
Sept. 26 Kickoff
Hoag plans to formally announce the Hoag Promise campaign at a Sept. 26 event on its main campus in Newport Beach.
The hospital has been using gifts raised during the recent quiet period to introduce its patients to new procedures, healthcare education, and outpatient facilities that carry service into the communities Hoag serves—a swath of OC that includes Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa, Newport Beach, and Irvine at its core, with various links to other communities.
“Healthcare is changing—we’re moving into the communities in a different way,” said Gary McKitterick, a real estate attorney who is currently chair of Hoag’s hospital board and a member of the foundation’s board.
Hoag Promise is one of the largest fundraising campaigns OC has seen in recent years.
Children’s Hospital of Orange County, a pediatric hospital in Orange, aimed to raise $125 million with its “Change CHOC, Change the World” campaign. Some of those funds went to the completion of the hospital’s Bill Holmes Tower.
And the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa recently announced a $68 million fundraising campaign, which includes a $13.5 million gift from the Argyroses.
Growing Role
The Hoag Promise campaign points to the increasing role hospital foundations and philanthropy play in funding operations in a time of healthcare reform and lower reimbursement from insurance companies for various services.
Foundations and philanthropy “are absolutely essential to our mission as the healthcare industry undergoes transformational changes in the way services are provided and funded,” said Flynn Andrizzi, president of the Hoag Hospital Foundation.
Andrizzi mentioned several Hoag programs that are funded through philanthropy, including its transcatheter replacement heart valve program that features Irvine-based Edwards Lifesciences Corp.’s Sapien family.
“Fundraising has changed fundamentally,” said Karen Linden, chair-elect of the Hoag hospital board. “We still do buy equipment, [but we also fund] programs like nurse navigators.” That program is a sort of patient advocate to help patients manage treatments and other care.
Many of Hoag’s previous large fundraising endeavors have concentrated on the capital side of the equation.
Hoag started a $50 million capital campaign in the early 2000s to fund its Women’s Pavilion, which opened 10 years ago. Ginny Ueberroth, Arden Flamson and Sandy Sewell, all foundation members, led that campaign.
“The foundation gets lots of people involved,” said Ueberroth, who was treated for breast cancer at Hoag in 1976 and has raised money for the hospital’s cancer center, as well as her family’s endowment and the Women’s Pavilion.
Having the foundation and its ability to conduct such campaigns “makes the things we do a lot easier,” Hoag Chief Executive Robert Braithwaite said, mentioning Hoag’s 5,000 employees, 1,600 affiliated doctors and 2,000 volunteers.
“Community support has been vital to our success,” Braithwaite said.
Hoag created a community leadership council to lead Hoag Promise. The council members serve voluntarily and advise Hoag executives on the campaign’s facets.
They’re also familiar with heavy fundraising lifting.
“I’ve been raising money for a lot of years now,” said Cynthia Stokke, the hospital foundation board’s chair and a member of the community leadership council.
“We want to get the community excited” with Hoag Promise, Stokke said.
Other members of the community council are: Ginny Ueberroth; Karen Linden; Roger Kirwan, immediate past chair of the foundation board; James Coufous, a foundation board member; David Horowitz, a Hoag Irvine advisory committee member; Terry Callahan, a member of the foundation’s 552 Club board who was treated for gynecologic cancer at Hoag and is heavily involved in event planning for the hospital and foundation; Pei-Yuan Chia, a retired vice chairman of Citibank, New York transplant, and foundation board member who said he became “emotionally very committed” to Hoag and its doctors as he battled cardiovascular ailments; and Dick Allen, a hospital board member whose family funded Hoag’s diabetes center.
“We have been successful with the old model, and we will be successful with this new one,” said Allen, adding that the roughly 17% to 18% of gross domestic product spent on healthcare now is unsustainable.
“Little Hoag Hospital [will be] at the forefront of change,” Allen said.
Hoag has already been at the forefront of another change: Three years ago, it combined with Irvine-based St. Joseph Health to form St. Joseph Hoag Health, an integrated regional care delivery company.
