The groundwork for Hoag’s $1 billion inpatient expansion in Irvine, Calif., began years before construction, as the health system spent roughly eight years expanding physician access and outpatient services across Orange County.
That outpatient footprint eventually gave Newport Beach, Calif.-based Hoag the confidence to make a major investment in inpatient care, President and CEO Robert Braithwaite told Becker’s. The expansion, which opened Sept. 21, adds 155 inpatient beds and 11 operating rooms across six new buildings at the Hoag Hospital Irvine Sun Family Campus, according to a news release from the health system.
The campus also takes a different approach from the traditional hospital tower. Instead of one tower with a floor assigned to each condition, Hoag built six buildings, with dedicated hospitals for women’s health and for cancer and digestive health, each paired with its own outpatient pavilion.
“Very distributed, not your typical big tower, which is what we see in most of U.S. healthcare,” Mr. Braithwaite said. “A different model altogether, but it’s beautiful. It’s exactly what the doctors wanted, which was hyper-focused facilities in those areas, which ultimately helped us on recruitment and physician talent as we were building.”
The Irvine campus opened in 2010 and for years was known primarily for Hoag Orthopedic Institute, with a smaller general hospital sharing the site. The general hospital grew through 2016, Mr. Braithwaite said, and the addition of roughly 200,000 square feet of outpatient space that year accelerated its growth further. Hoag ran a design competition to determine what came next, with about 10 firms submitting proposals for how the expansion should be configured. LPA Design Studios, the firm Hoag selected, proposed what Mr. Braithwaite calls a “village” model.
From a financial standpoint, Mr. Braithwaite acknowledged that the model is more expensive than a traditional hospital design.
“In that general hospital model, you usually have a floor dedicated to a condition, and the next floor is another condition,” he said. “This model actually creates dedicated buildings to conditions, so it is more costly than the traditional model. That’s where philanthropy really stepped in and helped us afford to deliver that model.”
Mr. Braithwaite said the model has helped Hoag recruit physicians while giving patients facilities dedicated to specific types of care.
“If you’re a cancer patient, it feels very much like dedicated cancer, because it is a dedicated cancer hospital and all the surrounding services that patient might need,” Mr. Braithwaite said. “So you’re not embedded within a general acute care footprint.”
Hoag also saw patients seeking more specialized approaches to their care, Mr. Braithwaite said.
“The consumers were responding very favorably, and with demands, not wanting a general approach to their conditions,” he said. “So this helped from a consumer perspective. It positioned the services so they became a lot more relevant to the discerning public who are experiencing their own personal healthcare journey.”
When asked about lessons learned from the project, Mr. Braithwaite said Hoag’s outpatient strategy was key to making the expansion possible.
“The whole idea was to put a Hoag within 10 minutes of where people live,” he said. “That was our overlay model, and that’s what we dedicated probably the last eight years to building out, which then enabled us to come back and say, ‘OK, now we’ve got that footprint, and we can afford the expense associated with creation of new inpatient beds.'”
Hoag Hospital Foundation’s Boldly Hoag campaign included $100 million from campus namesakes Diana and David Sun and $25 million from Benjamin and Carmela Du, whose gift established the Du Family Hospital Pavilion. The campus brings the Irvine hospital’s total bed count to 251 and includes 120,000 square feet of ambulatory facilities, a 17-bed, level 3 neonatal ICU, a 24/7 OB emergency department and what Hoag says is Orange County’s first dedicated cancer urgent care.
