Hoag leaders make a bold promise as they prepare to open the hospital’s $1 billion Sun Family Campus in Irvine next September: Come to Hoag and you won’t have to travel anywhere else for care.
Once it opens, Hoag’s expansion will feature six new buildings, including a dedicated women’s hospital, a surgical pavilion and a digestive health and cancer institute. The campus will include 155 inpatient beds, 11 operating rooms, 24 labor, delivery, recovery and postpartum suites, a 17-bed NICU, robotic-assisted surgery, a worship center, a wellness park — and the list goes on.
Hoag isn’t the only one growing in Irvine. This year and next, major health players — including City of Hope and UC Irvine — are set to add millions of square feet of new hospital and health education space. By decade’s end, Irvine could be one of the nation’s most health-focused communities.
So as construction work continues on Hoag’s Irvine campus, the doctors leading three specialities that will have homes there, women’s health, digestive health and cancer care, sat recently for a roundtable discussion on what the expansion will allow their health care teams to do and what will set Hoag apart.
For starters, Dr. Steven Grossman, the lead of the hospital’s cancer institute, said a new 24/7 cancer urgent care center will be there for cancer patients across Orange County.
“Show up if you have cancer and you have a problem that needs attention anytime of the day, certainly in the middle of the night, weekends and holidays,” he said. “Our facility is going to be open to everybody, so it doesn’t matter who’s treating you.”
Cancer patients often face sudden medical issues at odd hours, and Grossman said emergency rooms, including at Hoag, “are just not the most ideal environment for immunosuppressed cancer patients.”
“This is certainly a differentiator throughout the county,” Grossman said of the 24/7 cancer urgent care center.
He added that the expansion allows Hoag to provide more specialized care than most community hospitals. Rather than having oncologists treat multiple types of cancer, Hoag will have doctors focusing exclusively on a single cancer type, whether lung, stomach, breast or blood cancer — offering experts in just about every cancer.
Dr. Allyson Brooks, a Hoag physician since 1993, said the Irvine hospital’s model is designed so families can get multiple types of care without leaving the community. Patients can receive screenings, imaging, doctor consultations, surgery and access clinical trials — all on the same campus, she said.
Brooks, who leads Hoag’s women’s health institute, said she envisions the Sun Family Campus will “allow women to feel that we can take care of them all in one location, her and her children, her spouse or partner in life, her parents, so that the family doesn’t need to leave the community where they live, where they work, where they have connections and support.”