Kaiser Permanente’s new hospital in Anaheim is six months ahead of schedule and under its original budget.
Kaiser now expects the 400,000-square-foot hospital on La Palma Avenue to cost $461 million and open in late 2012. It’s the centerpiece of an $800 million medical campus that also will have two offices, a support building and a parking structure.
“We’re significantly under budget, which the board, of course, is thrilled with,” said Julie Miller-Phipps, senior vice president and executive director of Oakland-based Kaiser’s Orange County operation.
The Anaheim hospital follows a $350 million hospital and medical campus in Irvine. That was the county’s first new hospital in some 20 years.
Kaiser already is beginning to outline steps for the latest development—which it’s calling “New Anaheim”—after it starts moving in next April.
“Between April and October, we will be beginning to do what we call ‘staff and stock,’” Miller-Phipps said.
That includes hiring about 300 new workers as well as training 1,200 employees who will be transferring from it’s aging hospital on Lakeview Avenue in Anaheim.
The medical office buildings at the new hospital are expected to house another 500 to 600 workers.
“All of the staff that are currently at the Lakeview hospital will need to be kind of rotating through the building when they’re not taking care of patients because all the equipment is new,” Miller-Phipps said. “The ability to find things is new and the units are going to look different.”
Savings on construction costs came in large part from locking prices in for materials early, as well as a computer modeling process to trouble-shoot potential problems during construction, according to Kaiser.
Construction will continue through the transition to the new hospital’s opening.
“They’re kind of working from the first floor up and then they’ll go back and do the basement,” Miller-Phipps said. “The largest equipment, the most complex equipment, is typically on the first and second floor.”
262 Beds
Kaiser Anaheim will open with six floors and 262 beds.
Features include 16 operating rooms, 36 emergency room bays, 24 pediatric beds, 20 neonatal intensive care bassinet rooms and a central utility plant.
The parking garage has 1,562 spaces.
The campus also includes what’s called a hospital support building with an outpatient surgery center.
Kaiser got the land for its new Anaheim hospital about 10 years ago, when it spent $14.5 million to buy a 15.5-acre site from Canada’s Cinram International Inc., a compact disc replicator.
It then added land from Williamson Storage, creating a 27-acre parcel for the project.
“For a number of years, we were looking to find a good site for the campus and fortunately we had a good opportunity a few years ago,” said Tony Smale, Kaiser Anaheim’s lead planner, who played the same role in Irvine. “That was the first task—to find a large enough site that was easily accessible, prominent in the community and our preference was to stay in Anaheim.”
Kaiser worked with the Office of Statewide Hospital Planning and Development to speed up the review and permit process.
Kaiser Anaheim and Kaiser Irvine were part of a “template program” that has allowed regulators to review plans for three hospitals concurrently. That helped get them approved in “about the time frame it would normally take to get just one approved,” said Paul Coleman, a Los Angeles-based deputy director with the state agency.
Kaiser has a similar hospital being built in Fontana, Stasney said.
State regulators used a phased plan review that allowed Kaiser to have regulators review portions of the hospital in a timely manner, Coleman said.
Kaiser Anaheim will meet California’s seismic safety law, which requires all acute-care hospitals in the state to be able to operate after a major earthquake by 2030.
The Anaheim hospital is coming along as Kaiser, the county’s largest health maintenance organization with some 403,000 local enrollees, has seen a surge in its membership in OC.
Locally, Kaiser has added 60,000 members in the past two years, Miller-Phipps said.
“It made sense to really … supersize this hospital” in comparison to Irvine because about 60% of Kaiser’s local members live in North and Central Orange County, she said.
Hensel Phelps Construction Co., which is based in Greeley, Colorado and has an Irvine office, is the project’s general contractor (see related Special Report, page 25). Los Angeles-based Cannon Design is the architect.
Kaiser plans to keep the old Lakeview hospital, which has about 200,000 square feet, and is set to make seismic upgrades.
A medical office building on that campus will remain open and occupied by primary care doctors. Specialists are set to go to the new Anaheim campus.
Lakeview’s Future
Miller-Phipps said no long-range decision has been made on the Lakeview hospital’s use. She said Kaiser will maintain the license on Lakeview and put it in suspension.
Potential uses range from a skilled nursing facility with a ventilator program to a medical school.
