Mission Hospital is set to open a $153 million expansion this month.
The Mission Viejo hospital has added a four-level, 94,000-square-foot building focused on treating patients with severe conditions and running diagnostic tests.
There’s also a chapel, as Mission Hospital is part of Orange-based Catholic hospital operator St. Joseph Health System.
The building signals a shift in Mission’s strategy. The expansion didn’t add a lot of beds—44 for a total of 345 at the hospital, with room for 21 more.
Peter Bastone, Mission’s chief executive, said he sees less of a need for beds as medical advances cut hospital stays.
He said he expects nearly half of the services now requiring hospital stays will move to outpatient in the next decade.
The focus of the new building is on critical care, or treating patients whose conditions are life-threatening and require constant monitoring. They include stroke and traumatic brain injury patients.
The building isn’t “elective procedure-driven,” Bastone said.
It also includes a center for doing computed tomography and other scans to screen for disease, bleeding, tumors and other conditions.
Critical care and diagnostic scanning are steady businesses for hospitals as the treatments often are covered by private insurance or the government’s Medicare program.
The “competitive nature” of hospitals, even not-for-profits such as Mission, plays a role in expansions, according to Mitch Morris, an Orange County-based principal in Deloitte Consulting’s healthcare practice.
“Patients have choices as to which hospital to go to in South County,” he said.
Hospitals also use expansions as a way to attract doctors and their patients, said Ron Mason, a principal in the Irvine office of Stamford, Conn.-based consulting firm Towers Perrin.
Mission’s building is part of an ongoing, multiyear expansion. The effort has included increasing the size of its emergency room from 13 to 38 rooms, adding a seven-level, 1,500-square-foot parking structure and opening Mission Medical Plaza, a five-story medical office building.
The hospital ranked No. 5 on the Business Journal’s most recent hospital list with annual patient revenue of about $335 million.
Mission has hired 27 clinical workers to staff the new building, Bastone said. Mission and a satellite hospital in Laguna Beach employ 2,585 workers in all.
The latest building was planned long in advance, which has come at a cost.
When Mission started work on its tower in 2007, it locked in prices for construction material at the peak of the market.
“With the information we had at the time, locking in material pricing was the most prudent choice,” Bastone said. “Of course, if we could have predicted the economic downturn, we would have approached it differently.”
Mission paid for the project through a mix of money from operations, $50 million from donors and borrowing, Bastone said.
Mission still is thinking about building another hospital in South County to serve inland communities, according to Bastone.
Integrating Mission Hospital Laguna Beach
Mission Hospital is bringing what’s now Mission Hospital Laguna Beach into its fold.
St. Joseph Health System—Mission’s Orange-based parent—bought the former South Coast Medical Center for $36.5 million earlier this year.
“It was a natural fit,” said Michael Beck, Mission Laguna’s vice president of operations.
Roseville-based Adventist Health sold the 208-bed hospital in part because of its distance from its other hospitals in Los Angeles, Glendale and Simi Valley.
Mission Laguna is less than 8 miles from Mission’s main campus.
Mission Laguna has kept some services, such as traditional medical-surgical beds and an emergency room, but cut others, Beck said.
Mission dropped offerings such as outpatient rehabilitation and cardiac rehabilitation because they are available at Mission, and it hasn’t restored maternity services, he said.
Mission Laguna ended up adding 305 workers, most of whom had worked for the hospital under Adventist.
St. Joseph is considering a new building at the site to meet the state’s earthquake law for hospitals, according to Peter Bastone, president and chief executive of Mission Hospital.
—Vita Reed
