Hospital construction will get its share of the healthcare sector’s spotlight next year.
Kaiser Permanente, which operates Orange County’s largest health plan with more than 400,000 members, is on track to finish a 400,000-square-foot hospital on La Palma Avenue in Anaheim. The $461 million project is a centerpiece of an $800 million medical campus that will also have two medical office buildings, a support building and a parking structure.
In Fullerton, St. Jude Medical Center will build a $285 million northwest tower.
The northwest tower will have 200,000 square feet of space, 120 beds and 14 operating rooms; it’s scheduled to be completed in summer 2014 and open in the fall of that year.
And Children’s Hospital of Orange County is moving toward the end of construction on a patient tower that’s rising amid the skyline of hospitals and office buildings in Orange. The tower, which will have 425,524 square feet of space, is the centerpiece of a $562 million expansion at CHOC.
The medical-device sector also will be busy.
Minneapolis-based Medtronic Inc., which has local locations in Lake Forest, Santa Ana and Irvine, said last week that it would establish a “center of excellence” for its heart valve operation in Santa Ana that includes a mix of new construction and renovations.
Medtronic, which has 700 workers in Orange County in total, plans to finish its expansion in 2013.
Edwards Lifesciences Corp., the Irvine-based heart valve maker, will go into its first full year of selling its Edwards Sapien less-invasive replacement valve after getting approval for it in late 2011.
Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach will be the first local facility to offer Sapien. Its preparations include a new operating room to accommodate Sapien.
Irvine-based Allergan Inc., the maker of Botox, will work on a new research and development center in New Jersey.
Beckman Coulter Inc., the Brea-based medical testing company, is working on a restructuring under new owner Danaher Corp. that includes some job cuts and a push into China.
Meantime, a survey conducted by Chicago-based human resources consulting company Aon Hewitt Inc. predicts local healthcare costs should go up on average 7.2%, or about $800 per worker, in 2012.
PERSON TO WATCH: J. ROBERT HURLEY
J. Robert Hurley begins 2012 as the chief executive of Brea’s Beckman Coulter Inc. in its new incarnation as a unit of Washing-ton, D.C.-based Danaher Corp.
Hurley, a longtime Beckman veteran, led the company’s integration of its $800 million buy of Olym-pus Corp.’s medical diagnostic business in 2009. He became in-terim chief executive in September 2010.
Hurley succeeded Scott Garrett, who resigned in the wake of difficulties that stemmed from Beckman’s recall of a heart test in early 2010. In 2012 Hurley will lead an effort to rework Beckman.
The goal is “setting a higher bar” with more discipline, accountability and simplicity at all levels of the operation, according to Lawrence Culp, Danaher’s chief executive.
—Vita Reed
COMPANY TO WATCH: APPLIED MEDICAL RESOURCES CORP.
Rancho Santa Margarita-based Applied Medical Resources Corp. enters the year as the reluctant subject of what could be Orange County’s first major initial public offering of a healthcare company since late 2007.
Applied, a maker of medical devices mainly used in surgeries, filed to raise $95 million in a public offering of 6.4 million shares of its common stock in mid-November.
The filing appears to be driven by Institutional Venture Partners, a Menlo Park late-stage venture capital firm that owns about 20% of Applied. Company Director Peter Thomas was a general partner with IVP from 1985 to 2000. IVP invested in a pair of IVP predecessor companies in 1988.
“Going public under the timing and in the manner demanded by IVP [isn’t in the company’s best interest],” Applied said in its filing.
The company also said its board “believes it will derive little benefit from being a public company.”
—Vita Reed
