As Annette Morgan, chief operating officer of City of Hope Orange County, prepares for the December opening of the region’s first cancer specialty hospital, she admits she’s had a few sleepless nights.
She has been overseeing the planning, design, activation and growth of City of Hope’s growing $1.5 billion expansion in Orange County.
Morgan likes to say it takes a city to deliver such a project.
“When you think about all of the hands and hearts that go into what we’re doing, it’s pretty awesome,” she told the Business Journal.
Morgan’s credited with expanding access to life-saving cancer care after securing a partnership with CalOptima that allows its nearly 800,000 members access to City of Hope of services.
Her leadership is “not just driven by expertise, but by heart,” Melissa Wong, lead of business development at Wells Fargo’s commercial banking office in OC, said when presenting the award to Morgan.
For these reasons, Morgan was honored on Oct. 15 at the Business Journal’s annual Women in Business Awards at the Irvine Marriott.
No. 2 Employee at City of Hope
Morgan was the second employee at City of Hope when she started in September 2018.
“At that time, we didn’t know what City of Hope Orange County was going to be,” Morgan said.
She had received a call from Annette Walker, president of City of Hope OC, who shared the mission to bring cancer services closer to Orange County.
The first year was spent looking at the needs of the community and putting together a proposal for the board, which gave its approval in 2019.
City of Hope is spending $1.5 billion to expand its campus in Orange County.
In 2022, it opened its 190,000-square-foot Lennar Foundation Cancer Clinic, located on 11 acres of the master-planned FivePoint Gateway community in Irvine.
Soon, the hospital will deliver the second component of the expansion three years after breaking ground.
“It’s incredible to think back in 2018 it was an idea and very quickly came to vision,” Morgan said.
Since joining City of Hope, Morgan said that she saw a team of 12 grow to more than 1,300 employees at the OC campus.
Former Providence Exec
Prior to City of Hope, Morgan spent nearly nine years at Providence St. Joseph Hospital and Providence Mission Hospital, among the top seven largest hospitals in the region.
Her roles included vice president of wellness and executive director of strategic services at St. Joseph, as well as manager of business development and strategic planning at Mission Hospital.
“I wore many hats over those years,” Morgan said. “When I came to City of Hope, I brought those skill sets with me.”
Morgan was inspired to work in healthcare by her mom, a nurse who worked at local hospitals such as St. Joseph and UCI Medical Center.
Her mother is also a cancer survivor and went through treatment when Morgan was in high school.
“It was really watching her go through her own experience of the amazing care and relationships she built when she worked in healthcare, then being a patient herself—it inspired me to pursue a similar career path,” Morgan said.
She said that her mother instilled the value of an education in her, something she’s grateful for as it “led to great things.”
Morgan, who joked about going through rebellious teenage years, earned a bachelor’s of business administration in marketing from California State University, Long Beach and her MBA from California State University, Fullerton.
An Orange County native, Morgan is involved in the community through her board positions at the Orange County Business Council and Taller San Jose Hope Builders, a nonprofit helping at-risk young adults get into life skills and job skills programs.
Hope Builders enrolls more than 200 young adults each year, according to the nonprofit.
