Another hospital tower has broken ground.
The Irvine office of San Francisco’s Swinerton Builders started work earlier this month on a 115,844-square-foot patient tower at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton.
The hospital, Orange County’s fourth-largest by patient revenue, expects to open the building in 2008.
Plans call for heart and vascular catheterization labs, an expanded emergency room, an additional critical care unit and two floors reserved for expectant moms, including birthing suites and a neonatal intensive care unit.
Grading, shoring, excavating and reinforcement are under way, according to Swinerton. The company also is starting on concrete walls. The building is set to top out in August.
The patient tower isn’t Swinerton’s only St. Jude work. The company just finished work on St. Jude Medical Plaza, a medical office project across the street from the hospital.
Chief Executive Robert Fraschetti has said his hospital is expanding to meet patient demands, California’s earthquake safety law and changes in how healthcare is delivered.
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Rendering of St. Jude tower: 115,844 square feet |
“There’s no doubt that hospitals are being constructed more to critical care and outpatient, as opposed to the (medical care or surgery-recovery) bed of the past,” Fraschetti said in an earlier interview. “There’s much more being done in the outpatient setting today. By the time patients do find their way to the hospital,it’s rather unfortunate to say this, but it’s true,they’re sicker. So we’re seeing more need for critical care, and the expansion really does accommodate this.”
St. Jude is one of three local hospitals of Orange-based St. Joseph Health System, a Catholic hospital operator. St. Joseph Hospital-Orange and Mission Viejo’s Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center also are adding patient towers to meet demand and state earthquake rules.
Valeant Gets Parkinson’s OK
Valeant Pharmaceuticals International of Costa Mesa received Food and Drug Administration approval earlier this month for Zelapar, a pill used in combination with other drugs to treat Parkinson’s disease.
Zelapar is set to be used as an additional treatment for patients who use the standard Parkinson’s drug cocktail of levodopa and carbidopa but aren’t responding as well to the combination.
Valeant’s drug is a tablet that dissolves in a patient’s mouth and delivers more of an active ingredient at a smaller dose.
The company received an approvable letter from regulators for Zelapar in October. But the FDA asked for more data from the drug maker before it signed off on the treatment.
Valeant acquired Zelapar in 2004 when it bought the U.S. drug business of London’s Amarin Corp. Under that deal, Valeant agreed to pay Amarin $8 million upon approval of Zelapar, and then $10 million after sales milestones were hit.
New Heart Valve Guidelines
Edwards Lifesciences Corp., the Irvine-based heart valve maker, is supporting new guidelines to treat heart valve disease that it says puts more emphasis on patient preference.
Up to now, age has played a big part in choosing a tissue valve rather than a mechanical one.
Edwards is a big player in tissue valves with its Perimount brand of valves. Edwards also is working on tissue valves that won’t require major surgery, an emerging segment industry figures are keen on.
The company is “pleased to see that the new guidelines acknowledge the advancements in tissue valve design technology,” said Anita Bessler, Edwards’ corporate vice president of global franchise management. The American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association jointly issued the guidelines earlier this month. The revisions are considered the first comprehensive update to practice guidelines in eight years.
Bits and Pieces:
Irvine’s Orange County Technology Action Network, or Octane, sponsored a forum last week on the UCI Eye Institute, which is under construction at the University of California, Irvine. Featured speakers included J. Andy Corley, chief executive of Eyeonics Inc. of Aliso Viejo, and George Baerveldt, chair of UCI’s ophthalmology department Computerworld magazine named Long Beach-based MemorialCare, which has three Orange County hospitals, among the best places to work for information technology professionals Enclarity Inc. of Aliso Viejo said it is working with Strenuus LLC of Kansas City, Mo., to provide software for physician networks Joseph Wu, an associate professor of psychiatry at UCI, and his colleagues had a paper accepted to Neuropsychopharmacology, a medical journal. The paper showed how sleep deprivation causes the brain’s frontal lobe to work less effectively and can’t be restored by one night of recovery sleep.
