Grand UCSF hospital’s opening to change care in S.F.

After more than a decade in the works, a new $1.52 billion UCSF Medical Center will open Sunday, finalizing the university’s vision to provide more personalized patient care and create a closer relationship between its physicians at the hospital and its scientists conducting biomedical research on the Mission Bay site.

By linking clinical care with the research, UCSF officials say, they hope to translate ideas into practice more quickly and turn discoveries into treatments and cures targeted specifically for a patient’s biology.

“We are bringing together so much more knowledge around precision medicine, around new approaches to providing care,” said Mark Laret, UCSF Medical Center’s chief executive officer. “For us, this becomes the place where people will participate in those clinical trials and research and benefit from that creativity. It’s a big investment in the future of medicine.”

The 878,000-square-foot center — a trio of hospitals that includes UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, the UCSF Bakar Cancer Center and the UCSF Betty Irene Moore Women’s Hospital — is also the next step in a changing landscape in health care in the Bay Area.

In addition to UCSF, a wave of hospital construction is happening throughout the city with the planned opening at the end of the year of San Francisco General Hospital’s new nine-story, 283-bed acute-care hospital, built at its current site with about $887 million in voter-approved bonds.

Openings in 2019

Other future San Francisco hospital openings include Sutter Health’s new California Pacific Medical Center at Van Ness Avenue and Geary Boulevard and a new hospital on California Pacific’s St. Luke’s campus at Cesar Chavez and Valencia streets. Both are set to open in 2019. Chinese Hospital on Jackson Street in Chinatown is also going through a rebuild.

In the East Bay, Kaiser Permanente opened a 349-bed flagship Oakland hospital in July. The $1.3 billion development includes a 100-office medical building, parking structure and equipment. In August, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, another Sutter Health facility, opened the Merritt Pavilion, a $350 million, 238-bed acute-care Oakland hospital.

The hospital boom isn’t coincidental. California hospitals have been required to upgrade their buildings to meet strict state-mandated safety requirements after the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake in Southern California. The cost of retrofitting existing buildings was higher than the cost of building new hospitals in many cases, leading to the wave of high-tech hospitals designed for the future of health care.

Enriched region

“As far as having cutting-edge health care, no other region will have what we have with all this new building going on,” said Sue Currin, San Francisco General’s chief executive officer.

Walter Kopp, a hospital and medical-group consultant in San Anselmo, said the benefits of world-class facilities go far beyond San Francisco. “Health care is one of the products of San Francisco,” he said. “It’s a business or service we provide, just like technology, that people come from long distances to get.”

The new UCSF complex, in the heart of the 60.2-acre Mission Bay research complex, is set to open on time and comes in about $30 million under the original budget.

The center comes with the only operating hospital helipad in San Francisco and will be used to bring in babies, children and pregnant women in life-threatening situations from outside hospitals. The complex has 20 operating rooms, nine labor-and-delivery rooms, and many intensive care units, including intensive care delivery rooms and specialized pediatric cardiac ICUs.

The world’s largest fleet of autonomous robotic couriers will deliver linens, meals and medicines through the wide corridors of the busy new hospital. Patients will have access to multimedia gadgetry in their private rooms to communicate with their families and clinicians.

Features designed to calm patient anxiety in the MRI, CT and other scanning suites include soothing music, dimmed lighting and images that glide across flat-screen monitors. Three of the scanning rooms have specific themes. In one, the scanner is designed as a cable car, complete with the ringing and clanking. In another, the scanner looks like a sleeping bag in Muir Woods. Another room features the sights and sounds of the Marina District.

The new hospital adds 289 inpatient beds to the city: 183 pediatric beds, 70 adult beds in the cancer center and 36 beds in the women’s hospital. A portion of the campus known as the Gateway Medical Building has 126 examination rooms and 10 outpatient procedure rooms.

UCSF’s Parnassus Heights campus in the Inner Sunset neighborhood will continue to have the largest inpatient presence, even after some of its 634 beds are changed or decommissioned. Some beds at UCSF’s Mount Zion medical center in the Western Addition will also be reduced.

On opening day Sunday, a carefully orchestrated convoy of ambulances will transport the new hospital’s first patients from Parnassus and Mount Zion.

Laret said a main strength of the hospital is its close proximity to where basic science happens. “When you get care in a place like this, you get care from people not only doing clinical trials but writing the (research) papers,” he said.

Wanda Jones, a longtime hospital consultant in San Francisco, didn’t see it that way. She didn’t question the quality of care the new hospital would provide but, rather, its location in the far east quadrant of the city near university buildings backed by biotech giants like Genentech.

“It’s located to the benefit of the faculty and students,” said Jones, president of Ensign & Jones. “The location is as far east as you can get in the city, and patients come from all over the city and beyond.”

Personal experience

The bells and whistles in the new hospital aside, how the hospital feels from the patient perspective is most important to people like Sally Coghlan McDonald, whose daughter was treated all her life at UCSF for a congenital syndrome that affects multiple body systems.

McDonald served on the new children hospital’s family advisory committee since 2006, helping to shape its amenities and design features to best serve the needs of young patients and their families.

“They listened to us, which was kind of amazing,” said McDonald, a San Francisco resident. For example, the designers originally created respite spaces where parents could spend time away from their child. But McDonald said the committee convinced them that the last place parents want to be is away from their child in the hospital.

Instead the focus was more on family-centric and outdoor spaces and improved amenities, she said.

McDonald’s daughter Maggie died last year at age 19. Through her daughter’s multiple surgeries and hospital stays, McDonald said UCSF became almost like another home for her family.

“It’s very difficult to have a child in the hospital; I don’t care if it’s appendicitis or cancer,” she said. “Anything that makes it easier is a tremendous benefit to families.”

Healthy operation

122,000 Outpatient visits anticipated in the first year

5,380 Outpatient surgeries anticipated in the first year

12,451 Light fixtures in the center

4,274 Inpatient surgeries anticipated in the first year

3,500 People, including 500 physicians, who will work at the hospital

1,049 Parking spaces, including 422 surface spaces and a 627-space, 10-level lot

20 Operating rooms, including eight adult, eight pediatric and four shared adult/pediatric rooms

4.3 Acres of green space in the complex