Population growth, increased use and a state law requiring hospitals to remain standing after a major earthquake have created a building boom at Orange County’s hospitals.
This decade has seen a crop of hospital construction projects in various stages of completion, including a few that have already opened. Here’s a sampling of what’s going on:
UCI Medical Center
Orange
OC’s only academic medical center has been in the news for its controversial,and now-shuttered,liver transplant program.
But the University of California, Irvine, also is working on a major expansion at its Orange campus at City Drive and Chapman Avenue.
UCI is set to spend about $370 million on a new hospital to supplant its aging current facility, which was built in the 1960s.
The new hospital is expected to be finished in late 2008.
UCI said demolition and mass excavation is completed. The pouring of the mat foundation was set to be finished late last week.
Basement retaining walls will be installed next, with the structure’s steel set to go up in April.
The university began planning for its new UCI Medical Center earlier this decade, when it received $235 million in revenue bonds from the state.
University reserves and financing also are being used for construction, with the remaining funds coming from private support. The cost of the project,like others around the county,has gone up during the past two years due to price increases for steel, concrete and other materials, and labor.
Hensel Phelps Construction Co. is building UCI’s hospital. Hellmuth Obata Kassabaum PC is the project architect.
Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian
Newport Beach
Hoag has seen its big construction story come to a close.
Late last year, the Newport Beach nonprofit opened its $200 million Sue and Bill Gross Women’s Pavilion. The pavilion was the largest single construction project at Hoag since 1974, when its west patient tower was built.
Hoag’s seven-level tower added 320,000 square feet of space to its campus. The cost was $129 million.
The Women’s Pavilion has more than 130 private maternity rooms, including some that face the Pacific Ocean. There is a breast center with direct-to-digital mammography, an ambulatory surgery center, an open neonatal intensive care unit and a postpartum area where newborns room with mom and dad.
McCarthy Building Co.’s Newport Beach office built the Gross pavilion. Taylor and Associates AIA, a Newport Beach firm that’s known for its healthcare work, designed the structure.
Although the women’s pavilion is earthquake-safe, earthquakes weren’t the primary motivation for opening the structure. Hospital officials cited a lack of beds to meet demand for the expansion.
The women’s pavilion is the beginning of a 10-year expansion at Hoag, which ranks No. 2 among OC hospitals by net patient revenue.
Hoag’s other plans include expanding and modernizing its emergency room and radiology department, and leveling its lower campus in order to move its childcare center. The hospital also wants to build an outpatient services building and parking garage.
St. Joseph Hospital
Orange
The local flagship of St. Joseph Health System is putting up a new patient care tower that is set to open in November 2007.
The facility will have 248,000 square feet of space, 150 beds, 14 operating room suites, a central sterile and supply room, and a 13,000-square-foot remote plant to run the hospital.
The tower is being built between St. Joseph and Children’s Hospital of Orange County, and will connect to both facilities via an underground tunnel.
The tower is being built in part to meet earthquake standards.
St. Joseph Chief Executive Larry Ainsworth said in a past interview that about 60% of the hospital’s 450,000-square-foot campus didn’t meet California’s earthquake safety standards.
The new facility also will help St. Joseph attract patients who want private rooms.
“Patients who are looking around the county,particularly the PPO patients who have a choice of whatever doctor they want to see and whatever hospital they’d like to be admitted to,are increasingly expecting private rooms,” Ainsworth said.
Ninety percent of St. Joseph’s new patient rooms are expected to be private.
St. Joseph also needed to expand its surgery services because it ranks among the busiest in the state.
“We have ORs that are too small. They were built 40 years ago,” Ainsworth said.
Foster City-based Rudolph and Sletten Inc.’s Irvine office is handling the construction. NBBJ, a Seattle-based healthcare architect, is designing the center.
St. Jude Medical Center
Fullerton
St. Jude, a sister hospital to St. Joseph in Orange, has plans to spend some $160 million this decade to expand its North Harbor Boulevard campus to meet a combination of demand, new services and earthquake rules.
The centerpiece of St. Jude’s effort is a five-story, 109,000-square-foot patient tower on the south side of the hospital’s main campus. The tower will add 61 beds.
The new facility will feature four heart catheterization labs, an expanded critical care unit and two floors devoted to maternity services, including labor and delivery rooms, postpartum facilities, a neonatal intensive care unit and a nursery.
A new emergency room also is on the plate.
St. Jude broke ground on the tower last March. Completion is expected in early 2008.
Swinerton Builders is constructing the facility. Kaplan McLaughlin Diaz Architects is the design firm.
St. Jude’s expansion plan also calls for an endoscopy center to house procedures for gastroenterology disorders, bronchial problems and colon cancer screenings, a 560-space parking garage and a nearby medical office building.
Mission Hospital Medical Center
Mission Viejo
Fast growth in South County, including the development of Ladera Ranch and Talega, is driving expansion plans for a third St. Joseph Health System hospital in OC.
Mission’s largest project in the works is a $100 million, four-story patient tower that will add 75 beds to the hospital. A construction launch date isn’t set, but a spokeswoman said it could start in the fall.
Mission’s tower is set to include imaging services, intensive care beds, a neuroscience unit, medical-surgical beds and a chapel.
Meanwhile, the hospital has nearly completed an $8.5 million expansion of its emergency room and trauma operations. Mission also recently finished a conference center.
The hospital doesn’t have to worry about earthquake retrofitting for most of its existing facilities, which were built under current standards just over a decade ago.
Mission’s oldest building, which was built in the early 1970s, has limited seismic exposure.
RBB Architects Inc. of Los Angeles designed the planned tower.
Kaiser Permanente
Irvine
The Oakland-based healthcare system, which operates OC’s largest health maintenance organization with more than 355,000 members, is building a sizable hospital in Irvine.
Kaiser is planning to spend more than $230 million to build a hospital complex in Irvine off the San Diego (I-405) Freeway that eventually could grow to three patient towers, more than 400 beds and 1 million square feet of space.
Kaiser’s Irvine hospital is set to open as early as fall 2007 with two patient care towers on a 40-acre parcel near the Irvine Regional Hospital and Medical Center on Sand Canyon Avenue and Alton Parkway.
Taylor and Associates is designing the building. It’s being built by Whiting-Turner Contracting Co.
The facility will have an emergency room, obstetrics and gynecology services and surgical suites.
Growth in South County’s population and Kaiser’s enrollment convinced it to build a hospital in Irvine, said Julie Miller-Phipps, senior vice president and OC service area manager, in an earlier interview.
Kaiser Irvine is expected to have 150 beds for immediate use, with another 100 beds set aside for the future. There also will be a maternity center in the facility.
“We deliver a lot of babies in this county,” Miller-Phipps said.
Meanwhile, Kaiser has plans to buid a hospital in Anaheim later this decade.
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Office Visits
Hospital construction isn’t the only building going on in the local healthcare sector. Medical office buildings are sprouting up across Orange County.
Pacific Medical Plaza, a four-story, 76,650-square-foot medical office building, is expected to open later this year. Pacific Medical is on Newport Boulevard in Costa Mesa, close to Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach.
Providence Center in Fullerton is set to have 106,800 square feet of medical space. Work on Providence Center’s first phase started late last month, with completion expected in spring 2007.
Other medical projects in the works include an 85,000-square-foot, five-story medical center that is going up on a site on Crown Valley Parkway near Cabot Road. The parcel previously housed a motorcycle dealership.
There’s also a 12-buiding, 150,000-square-foot office complex in San Juan Capistrano under construction with about a third of the space set for medical office and surgery space.
Boureston Development Inc., a longtime Irvine medical office developer, recently bought a building in Brea for $3.7 million that it plans to convert into medical use.
A big medical office complex opened two years ago. Kaiser Permanente, operator of the area’s largest HMO with more than 355,000 local members, opened a $48 million medical office building and specialty care center near Sand Canyon Avenue and the San Diego (I-405) Freeway.
,Vita Reed
