UCI Health’s journey as an organization began decades ago as the University of California regents discussed the need for a new hospital. Questions lingered, such as where the hospital would be, before ultimately deciding on a new campus in Irvine in Orange County. They also purchased Orange County Medical Center and renamed it UCI Medical Center, now known as UCI Health — Orange.
“They realized there was an opportunity at the UC board of regents level to deploy a strategy they had done successfully before elsewhere in California,” Chad Lefteris, president and CEO of UCI Health, told Becker’s. “They acquired what was once the county hospital for that purpose and more. In the end, it was about creating an opportunity to improve the health of Californians and training the next generation of the healthcare workforce.”
Fast-forward to 2026 and UCI Health, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, has grown to one of California’s largest academic health systems, having trained more than 30,000 physicians and health professionals. It opened an all-electric hospital Dec. 10 in Irvine, capping a long-term vision for its $1.3 billion medical campus. The site also includes the Joe C. Wen & Family Center for Advanced Care and the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and Ambulatory Care building, both of which opened in 2024. In addition, UCI Health is set to open its seventh hospital, UCI Health — Irvine Rehabilitation Hospital, later this summer.
Mr. Lefteris, speaking with Becker’s on July 9, is still reminded of how far the system has traveled.
“When I stop and think about those decisions that were made, I’m sitting at the Orange campus today, and I look out and think this was farmland and citrus and avocado groves way back then,” he said. “The hallowed ground that we get to sit on today and provide care has a long-standing history of serving this community, and now the region. That’s pretty amazing to think about in only 50 years.”
The system Mr. Lefteris oversees today looks little like the single hospital purchased in 1976. UCI Health now spans six hospitals, its seventh opening imminently, and a service area of 5.6 million people across Orange and Los Angeles counties. As the only academic medical center in Orange County, one of the largest counties in the country by population, the system occupies a position no other organization in the region fills.
“I kind of believe in the theory that a rising tide floats all boats, and I think that’s true in healthcare,” Mr. Lefteris said. “We love to keep our amazing trainees within our UCI Health family, but we can’t keep everyone. When they go and populate the communities in which we serve together, that’s also a win for those communities.”
The system’s mission — discover, teach, heal — is simple by design. Mr. Lefteris said it functions as a prioritization tool in a health system that cannot do everything at once: funding the academic enterprise, running a safety-net operation, delivering the most complex care in the county and expanding a community-based footprint simultaneously.
“Life would maybe be a little easier if we had only one or two of those missions, but this region requires that of us,” he said. “There’s no county hospital in Orange County; that went away in 1976, and so we sit on this very interesting intersection of being the safety-net provider, providing the most complex care to all, training the next generation and providing the most cutting-edge research.”
Looking forward, Mr. Lefteris describes UCI Health using a phrase that emerged during the worst stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic and has since become embedded in the organization’s culture: It is a forever organization. The phrase captures a long-view posture on capital, workforce and strategy, one Mr. Lefteris said shapes decisions that might look different at a system without the same institutional permanence.
The all-electric hospital that opened in December reflects that logic. Its 144 beds were built as, in Mr. Lefteris’ words, “a giant intensive care unit.”
“The whole hospital was designed that way to give us the greatest flexibility in the next 50 years and beyond, because you don’t want to get in there and try to renovate in 10 or 20 years when it’s completely full,” he said. “Going all electric was also a real forever-mindset choice to minimize our carbon footprint and reduce our impact on the environment.”
But the forever organization framing is not immune to the challenges and financial pressures facing safety-net facilities. Mr. Lefteris, an America’s Essential Hospitals board member, said safety-net providers, UCI Health among them, face greater financial risk from federal reimbursement changes than almost any other class of health system, and that the next two years concern him as much as the next 50.
“We know that the safety-net hospitals and health systems are, I believe, at the greatest risk of harm as relates to future reimbursement changes,” he said. “Not just here, but around the country. There’s not a lot of organizations coming into states or regions or counties filling the unmet need like the safety-net providers are doing. That worries me about the next 50 years, even the next two years.”
The demographic shifts accelerating across Orange County compound that concern. The populations UCI Health serves are aging and their care needs are changing, and the system’s role in meeting them, Mr. Lefteris said, may look different over the next half-century than it did over the first.
Inside the organization, the forever mindset has moved beyond leadership and into the culture. Mr. Lefteris, who has been at UCI Health for more than seven years and in the CEO seat since April 2020, said the phrase now surfaces regularly in conversations with front-line colleagues and that it shapes how the system thinks about the 50-year celebration itself.
“It’s only been the first 50 years, and look at how far we have come,” he said. “I think we continue to carry the opportunity and the weight of a forever organization because of what our communities need of us.”
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