Children’s Hospital of Orange County at Mission and Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center, both of Mission Viejo, are expanding in neighboring Rancho Santa Margarita.
CHOC at Mission and Mission Hospital plan to open medical offices and a pediatric urgent care center within a 24,000-square-foot medical complex under construction at the corner of El Paseo and La Miranda. The building is set to be completed this spring, while CHOC at Mission said it plans to start seeing patients this summer.
CHOC at Mission is spending $625,000 on its section of the building, which will have more than 3,200 square feet of space. It’s set to include a full-time pediatric office and after-hours urgent care. Teresa Conk, CHOC vice president of business development, said that the hospital felt there was a need for such services, given Rancho Santa Margarita’s growing number of families with children.
Mission Hospital plans to take up about 4,700 square feet of space and spend about $1.5 million on its section. Mission Hospital, a member of Orange-based St. Joseph Health System, plans to offer adult medical services, with the remaining part of the building being leased to private medical offices. Officials said a similar center is being built at Talega, a masterplanned community in San Clemente. A third facility is planned for Ladera Ranch in Rancho Santa Margarita.
Separately, CHOC said it was ranked 11th on a list of 178 children’s hospitals across the U.S. The survey was conducted by and published in Child magazine.
Officials emphasized that the survey was based on hard data, rather than subjective opinions, and calculated results according to criteria including the quality of doctors and nurses, survival rates for common childhood cancers and the amount of government research funding received.
Evaluation scores from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations were used to narrow the field. After that, the 50 children’s hospital finalists were sent a survey developed by the magazine’s medical advisory board, which then reviewed and evaluated results.
New Head at PacifiCare Unit
PacifiCare Behavioral Health, Laguna Hills, named Dr. Jerome Vaccaro president and chief executive officer. Vaccaro, previously vice president and corporate medical director, replaced Dr. S. Alan Savitz, who retired. PacifiCare Behavioral is a subsidiary of PacifiCare Health Systems Inc., Santa Ana.
Vaccaro has been with PacifiCare Behavioral since 1996, when he joined as medical director. His background includes a stint as director of community psychiatry at University of California, Los Angeles.
PacifiCare Behavioral also introduced a system to assist healthcare providers in determining how a patient is progressing called Algorithms for Effective Reporting and Treatment, or ALERT. The process is based on a pair of proprietary data collection instruments for patients. Among other things, ALERT involves collecting patient self-assessment data and analyzing it with practitioner data. The system is intended to predict how a patient should improve with treatment and measure progress at multiple points in time.
The system also can help detect drug or alcohol addiction problems that aren’t always identified by practitioners, according to PacifiCare Behavioral.
