A $40-million, 60,000-square-foot medical facility in Orange will break ground soon with an initial $16.6 million in public money and further backing from OC healthcare providers St. Joseph Hoag Health and Kaiser Permanente, as well as OC’s largest health insurer Cal Optima.
Construction is scheduled to start in the second quarter after the Orange County Board of Supervisors in January voted 5-0 to fund the effort.
CHOC Children’s is also on board with plans to provide some pediatric care.
It’s the first of three such projects envisioned in the next several years from public-private partnership Be Well OC, which aims to treat mental health and substance abuse.
The program will “benefit all county residents” regardless of their ability to pay, County Supervisor Board Chair Lisa Bartlett said in a statement.
Be Well OC is a local element of a wider national effort to address substance use disorders—opioid addiction, for instance—as well as the latest part of a local push on homelessness and mental health.
Location, Location
The planned facility will replace an existing 45,000-square-foot office building at a site about three miles from CHOC and St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, north of the interchange of the 5, 57, and 22 freeways and along the Santa Ana River.
The site is near some of the county’s greatest need for its services, according to Richard Afable, chief executive of Newport Beach-based physician provider platform Concierge Key Health LLC and part of a working group that preceded Be Well OC.
“We call it a hub,” he said, with the spokes reaching out to churches, community groups, ethnic associations and academia.
The idea is for a single center to offer a wide variety of services from education to transitional housing to mental health stabilization in an emergency room.
Executives said the facility complements—not replaces—current care providers. It doesn’t plan to hire staff but instead will work with organizations already involved in healthcare that overlaps with Be Well OC’s goals.
Being Well
A dominant component of the work will be treating mental health.
CalOptima Chief Executive Michael Schrader, whose agency is putting down $11.4 million on the project for future services, said a single point of access to care is crucial.
The center will provide “unprecedented access to services for [people] who face very real challenges with transportation, language and more.”
CHOC Children’s extending its efforts in the specialty by leading the pediatric portion of Be Well OC.
Chief Executive Kimberly Cripe has locally been at the forefront of such work—CHOC Children’s formed a multi-agency Pediatric and Adolescent Mental Health System of Care Task Force four years ago and last year opened a 12,000-square-foot facility providing services to patients ages 3 to 17, including 18 beds for long-term stays. It’s OC’s first pediatric mental health unit with that element.
“The best way to address mental wellness in young people is to prevent [it] in the first place or greatly reduce the manifestation of it so they never need a psych bed [or] ER,” Afable said.
Big Backers
Afable was previously chief executive of St. Joseph Hoag Health in Irvine and executive vice president at Providence St. Joseph Health Southern California, a regional 14-hospital system owned by Renton, Wash.-based Providence St. Joseph Health.
The region is now run by Erik Wexler, who told the Business Journal that the 50-hospital system initially gave $1.5 million to seed the Be Well OC coalition of healthcare and business execs and will give $8 million total. Separately, the system announced a $30 million commitment to California mental health and wellness.
“There’s nothing more important than health and wellness,” he said. “We have to consider the whole person.”
Mark Costa, executive director of the Kaiser’s OC service area, said it has contributed money and planning to the effort.
Real Need
About 20% of adults have mental health needs in any given year and one in 25 has a serious illness, Be Well OC estimates. Half of all chronic mental illness begins in the teen years and one in 10 young people experience a major episode of depression in a given year.
At least 34,000 residents who live near the new facility are candidates for its services, Costa said.
