Hospitals across Orange County are expanding, adding patient towers and other facilities as part of a building boom.
Then there’s Kaiser Permanente.
It’s building a $350 million hospital and medical complex
from scratch in Irvine, the first entirely new hospital built here since 1990.
Kaiser’s Sand Canyon Avenue hospital is 93% done and set to take its first patients in spring 2008.
By the Business Journal’s count, it’s the first hospital to open here since nearby Irvine Regional Hospital and Medical Center opened 17 years ago.
The Kaiser hospital is set to have 150 beds when it opens and room for another 100, putting it in the middle tier of hospitals here.
The campus also includes some 250,000 square feet of medical office space. One building already is open with another set for May.
The Irvine hospital isn’t the biggest for Oakland-based Kaiser Permanente, which counts about 372,000 health plan members in OC.
In Downey, Kaiser’s building a 350-bed medical center, said Tony Smale, lead planner for the Irvine hospital. Kaiser’s Los Angeles medical center has some 400 beds, he said.
But the health plan sees Irvine as a model for developing hospitals, said Joseph Stasney, project director for Kaiser’s Orange County-Irvine Medical Center.
It’s the first Southern California hospital that’s part of Kaiser’s “template program,” Stasney said.
The health plan worked closely with the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, California’s main hospital regulator, to speed the review and permit process, Stasney said.
Kaiser plans to use its experience building Orange County-Irvine Medical Center in other locations, he said.
The health plan is looking to get up medical centers quicker. The Irvine facility will take some five years to develop.
Historically, hospital development takes about seven to nine years from the idea stage to seeing patients, according to Stasney.
“We wanted to develop a faster methodology,” he said. “We did not want to go this path alone; we wanted to walk hand in hand” with regulators.
Kaiser’s plan allows “a shorter design and permitting period,” said John Gillengarten, OSHPD’s acting deputy director.
“It’s the same basic design, but they can modify it to local conditions,” he said. “It cuts down our review time, because we will have looked at it once or twice” before.
Kaiser worked with San Francisco architects Chong Partners Architecture and SmithGroup Inc. to come up with the template design for the Irvine hospital.
Baltimore-based Whiting-Turner Contract-ing Co., which has an Irvine office, is Orange County-Irvine Medical Center’s general contractor.
Outside construction is set to finish in July. Kaiser’s operations side then plans to take over, setting up and adding equipment before opening.
“That all has to be put in place,” said Barbara Shipnuck, a Kaiser spokeswoman.
Orange County-Irvine Medical Center is set to be a full-service hospital with a surgical unit and maternity center.
It faces the San Diego (I-405) Freeway, across the street from Tenet Healthcare Corp.’s Irvine Regional Hospital and Medical Center.
Kaiser’s costs for building the hospital went up because of higher prices for steel, Stasney said. The health plan worked with its subcontractors to develop what he called “effective procurement” to offset higher prices for materials.
Kaiser avoided a bigger hit by buying steel early on, said Julie Miller-Phipps, the health plan’s senior vice president and Orange County area service manager.
Rising materials costs, which started a few years ago, have affected projects of all types.
The Irvine hospital will meet California’s seismic safety law, which requires all acute-care hospitals in the state to withstand a major quake by 2013 and keep operating after one by 2030.
Kaiser is using a structural bracing system that was introduced in Japan after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, Stasney said.
The brace is made up of a steel core plate surrounded by mortar and enclosed in a steel tube. The core plate is designed to yield without buckling when a severe quake hits.
Kaiser is OC’s largest health plan operator. Its local enrollment has doubled from 190,000 in the early 1990s.
South County’s growth convinced the health plan to build a hospital in Irvine, Miller-Phipps said.
“We’ve been growing our membership down in the southwest part of the county for some time now,” she said. “We’re starting to get to the point where we would be better served by having our own hospital down there.”
Kaiser plans to hire 600 to 800 nurses, technicians and others to open Orange County-Irvine Medical Center. The health plan’s doctors are employed by a medical group affiliated with Kaiser.
Hiring is set to start in the fourth quarter.
A transition team’s been put together, Shipnuck said. Margie Harrier, transition leader, and Nancy Gin, physician transition leader, head it.
Kaiser has started marketing the hospital to members in South County and to employers, said Juan Lopez, the health plan’s local director of sales and account management.
Outpatient surgery and an urgent care center have been available at a 108,000-square-foot medical office building on the campus for about two years. Direct mail was done for the first building and is planned for the second, according to Lopez.
Marketing material also is being given to consultants and brokers, Lopez said. Kaiser’s been doing tours for brokers and others during construction.
The health plan has seen some membership gains with the campus, Lopez said.
A 147,000-square-foot building that Kaiser officials call “medical office building II” is set to open this May.
“It’s a six-story medical office building that’s immediately adjacent,” Stasney said.
Besides medical offices, the building is set to include hospital administrative offices, among other things.
There’s also a 28,000-square-foot central utility plant that’s about 99% complete, and a 400-square-foot parking garage.
The health plan has a lot of space to build on, thanks to a land deal with the city of Irvine for 40 acres, 30 of which are usable.
After Orange County-Irvine Medical Center opens, Kaiser plans to evaluate its contracts with other hospitals to take overflow patients, Shipnuck said.
The health plan now contracts for overflow patients with Irvine Regional Hospital, Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center in Fountain Valley and Anaheim Memorial Medical Center, which is being sold to Prime Healthcare Services Inc. (see story, this page).
Kaiser’s not done yet with hospital construction in OC.
It’s set to replace its aging 200-bed hospital on Lakeview Avenue near the Riverside (91) Freeway in Anaheim with a 250-bed, $326 million facility that’s scheduled to break ground in early 2008.
Kaiser spent $14.5 million in 2001 for a 15.5-acre site in Anaheim from Canada’s Cinram International Inc., a compact disc replicator. It later added land from Williamson Storage in assembling a 27-acre parcel for the project.
Kaiser’s Anaheim hospital is set to be finished around 2012.
