Kaiser Permanente is set to add more beds—and jobs—to Orange County’s hospital market.
It will open a $425 million, 434,000-square-foot hospital on La Palma Avenue in Anaheim on Sept. 12. The hospital is the centerpiece of a $650 million campus that also features two medical office buildings, a support facility and a parking structure with more than 1,500 spaces.
The new hospital will open with six floors and 262 beds, doubling Kaiser’s total at its current Anaheim hospital on Lakeview Avenue. The hospital has 17 operating rooms, 36 emergency room bays, 24 pediatric beds and 20 neonatal intensive care bassinet rooms, and its special features include new touch-screen technologies and a central utility plant.
Kaiser is opening La Palma with 2,000 employees and doctors, including the hospital and its medical office buildings. Most will transfer from the Lakeview hospital, but the higher bed capacity means there will be about 100 new hires, a spokesperson said.
Largest HMO
Kaiser operates Orange County’s largest health maintenance organization in addition to its hospitals in Anaheim and Irvine, and medical offices. It now has 453,000 members, with a majority of them living in North and Central Orange County.
La Palma is replacing Kaiser’s aging Lakeview facility, once known as Canyon General Hospital.
Kaiser will retain the Lakeview building and retrofit it for an as-yet-unspecified new use.
Kaiser has a seven-member transition team led by Joshua Cain, an anesthesiologist, as it readies for La Palma’s opening.
Responsibilities
The team’s first responsibility is “to make sure that the hospital is built correctly,” Cain said.
“The second responsibility is to make sure we get it staffed and stocked,” he added. “And our third big responsibility is to get it licensed.”
Licensing is handled by the California Department of Health. That department has scheduled a licensing visit on the week of Aug. 13.
Kaiser will move various hospital departments into the new facility on a staggered basis prior to making the major patient transfer.
Kaiser will have a license to operate both Lakeview and La Palma come Sept. 12, Cain said. It will then close Lakeview.
Moving
That will allow the health system to begin to move patients between the two hospitals. Kaiser has hired PRN Ambulance of Los Angeles to do the moves. PRN recently completed another transfer of Kaiser’s patients between an old and new facility in Downey.
Expectant mothers who haven’t yet gone into labor will be the first patients moved. Other early movers include babies who are in the neonatal intensive care unit and emergency room patients.
Kaiser also has a group of consultants—based in its Southern California regional headquarters in Pasadena—which is helping in the transition.
Kaiser Anaheim was many years in the making. It got most of the land for the hospital in the early 2000s, when it spent $14.5 million to buy a 15.5-acre site from Cinram International Inc., a Toronto-based compact disc replicator.
Oakland-based Kaiser then added land acquired from Williamson Storage, creating a 27-acre parcel for the campus.
Kaiser Irvine
Kaiser opened a $350 million hospital and medical campus in Irvine in 2008. Kaiser Irvine, located at Alton Parkway and Sand Canyon Avenue, was the county’s first new hospital in about 20 years.
Greeley, Colo.-based Hensel Phelps Construction Co. is general contractor on the Kaiser Anaheim project. Cannon Design of Los Angeles was the architect.
Kaiser’s La Palma facility is the first of several big-dollar hospital projects that will be opening in Orange County within a year or so.
Children’s Hospital of Orange County will open its 425,524-square-foot South Tower next year. The Orange pediatric hospital’s tower is the focal point of a $562 million expansion project that includes new office space and renovations of some other facilities.
And St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton is pulling up a $285 million patient tower that is set to open in fall 2014. St. Jude’s Northwest Tower will have 200,000 square feet of space, 120 beds and 14 operating rooms.
