Orange County’s hospital landscape has several big-dollar projects set to open in the next couple of years.
Children’s Hospital of Orange County, St. Jude Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente are putting up large patient towers, motivated in part by new regulations requiring hospitals to remain operational after a major earthquake, as well as simple population growth.
“There’s still a lot of latent demand for acute care, inpatient projects,” said Steve Mynsberge, executive vice president in the Newport Beach office of St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Cos.
Tougher state regulations passed in the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge earthquake have spurred a spate of tower retrofits and new construction. The new towers are designed to withstand greater seismic events than existing structures.
McCarthy is general contractor at St. Jude and CHOC; both of their towers were conceived during the mid- to late 2000s—a go-go period for hospital construction. All three projects are starting to take shape after a long period of review by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.
CHOC is moving toward the end of construction on a patient tower that’s rising amid the skyline of hospitals and office buildings in Orange. The tower, which will have 425,524 square feet of space, is the centerpiece of a $562 million expansion at CHOC that also features new office space and renovations of some other facilities.
CHOC’s South Tower stands to initially add about 90 beds at the pediatric hospital for an eventual total of 404 beds in 640,524 square feet of space. A 175,000-square-foot medical office building and renovations to existing space are also part of the project.
The hospital is paying for the project through a fundraising effort, loan money and operations. CHOC sold $265.5 million worth of revenue bonds through the California Health Facilities Financing Authority in 2009 and also used money from a pair of bond initiatives passed in 2004 and 2008 by California voters to fund children’s hospitals.
The South Tower project—set for completion next year—will feature an emergency department, operating rooms, a medical laboratory and space for a pathology department, imaging and radiology services and the hospital’s neuroscience institute.
Disneyland Resort in Anaheim donated $5 million to the project, featuring a sponsorship of the tower lobby.
$285M Tower
St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton is putting up a $285 million patient tower.
The hospital’s Northwest Tower will have 200,000 square feet of space, 120 beds and 14 operating rooms. The tower is set to open in fall 2014, and will boost capacity to 359
beds at St. Jude, one of three area hospitals owned by Orange-based St. Joseph Health System.
The project—situated near the intersection of Bastanchury Road and Harbor Boule-vard—is part of a master plan devised by hospital executives in 2004. A Southwest Tower included in the expansion plan opened in 2009, and a third new tower is envisioned eventually.
The Northwest Tower was originally expected to cost more than $300 million, but the materials ended up costing less than planned.
“This was a design-build delivery where we had the subcontractors on board,” Mynsberge said. “If we were facing any material escalations, we went ahead and made the deal to go ahead and buy and lock in prices.”
The hospital is paying for Northwest Tower through a mix of cash, bonds and philanthropic support.
Other features of Northwest Tower include a new surgical floor with a hybrid operating room containing equipment made by Germany-based Siemens AG. It also will feature an interoperative magnetic resonance imaging machine, directly connected to a neurosurgery operating room.
Anaheim Expansion
Kaiser Permanente has the tower project that’s closest to completion.
Its new hospital in Anaheim this year will open a tower boasting 400,000 square feet of space on La Palma Avenue. The $461 million project is the centerpiece of a medical campus that also features two medical office buildings, a support facility and a parking structure.
“We’re significantly under budget—which the board, of course, is thrilled with,” said Julie Miller-Phipps, senior vice president and executive director of Kaiser’s Orange County operations.
The hospital will open with six floors and 262 bedrooms. Features include 16 operating rooms, 36 emergency room bays, 24 pediatric beds, 20 neonatal intensive care bassinet rooms and a central utility plant.
Kaiser got most of the land for the hospital more than 10 years ago, when it spent $14.5 million to buy a 15.5-acre site from Cinram International Inc., a Toronto-based compact disc replicator. The Oakland-based healthcare system then added land acquired from Williamson Storage, creating a 27-acre parcel for the campus.
“For a number of years, we were looking to find a good site for the campus,” Tony Smale, Kaiser’s lead hospital planner, said in an earlier interview. “Fortunately, we had a good opportunity a few years ago.”
Finding a large enough site “that was easily accessible and prominent in the community” was the first task, Smale recalled.
Kaiser preferred to stay in Anaheim, where it’s been for more than 30 years, he said.
The Anaheim hospital follows the completion of a $350 million hospital and medical campus, opened in Irvine in 2008.
Kaiser Irvine, located at Alton Parkway and Sand Canyon Avenue, was the county’s first new hospital in about 20 years.
Kaiser—OC’s largest health maintenance organization, with more than 400,000 enrollees—has, according to Miller-Phipps, added about 60,000 new members in the past two years.
“It made sense to really … supersize this hospital,” she said.
About 60% of Kaiser’s local members live in North and Central Orange County, Miller-Phipps said.
Greeley, Colo.-based Hensel Phelps Con-struction Co. is general contractor on the Kaiser project. Cannon Design of Los An-geles was the architect.
