Hoag’s Irvine expansion fits right in

A first visit to Hoag’s massive Irvine expansion could, naturally, involve asking for some help navigating its floor plan.

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When the bigger Hoag Hospital Irvine Sun Family Campus opens its last buildings to the public this month offering care to patients of unique health journeys — from mothers and newborns to cancer and digestive health patients — Hoag leaders said it could take time “acclimating the community” to the campus’s layout.

“We had done a previous scheme to this, to what we’ve built. It was a regular hospital tower, very traditional. But Irvine is planned around a series of villages,” said Hoag Real Estate and Facilities Senior Vice President Sanford Smith, part of a team that helped steer the $1 billion construction project toward its completion.

“That was sort of the guiding principle,” Smith said of the individual specialty care facilities that were built instead. “This was going to become the healthcare village.”

Some community members got the gist of moving around the campus, situated on the northwest corner of Alton Parkway and Sand Canyon Avenue, Saturday, Sept. 19, as they took guided tours of inpatient and outpatient facilities for cancer, digestive and women’s health.

The tours were part of a free “World of Wonder” event being hosted by Hoag to celebrate the expansion project’s completion.

“We had the rare opportunity to build around the patient experience from the ground up,” Hoag Hospital Board of Directors Chair Robert Brunswick said. “That meant thinking not only about the medicine and technology inside these buildings, but also about how patients and families move through them, how they stay connected to their care teams, and how the environment itself can support them during some of the most important moments of their lives.”

A healthcare ‘ecosystem’

Hoag leaders said “science-based hospitality” — the idea that patients’ environments contribute to their healing — helped inspire the impulse to ditch the traditional mid-rise hospital model and instead build a fluid “healthcare village” tapping into Irvine’s nature scene and suburban feel.

Rooms are private, stocked with equipment and technology that localize care and give patients and their support systems more control over their experience. Each inpatient room lets in lots of natural light and opens up to views of greenery, including outdoor courtyards and balconies that are accessible to patients and visitors looking for fresh air or a serene moment.

“Hoag Hospital Irvine’s Sun Family Campus is an excellent example of how hospitals are rethinking not only where care is delivered, but the entire experience surrounding that care for families and caregivers alike,” said Sara May, the Orange County regional vice president of the Hospital Association of Southern California.

Also, the campus’s decentralized layout — separating the Women’s Outpatient Pavilion, Women’s Hospital, Cancer and Digestive Hospital and Cancer and Digestive Outpatient Pavilion into distinct but interconnected blocks — gives a nod to its intense specialization.

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And with additional hospital beds, new services and a growing team of medical care professionals, there’s also how Hoag’s expansion fits into the larger Orange County picture.

“For Orange County, the campus represents a substantial investment in the region’s health care infrastructure, including the addition of 155 inpatient beds that will expand capacity to meet the needs of a growing and changing community,” May said. “As health care needs become increasingly complex, investments that expand access while creating more coordinated, patient-centered environments are especially important.”

The Sun Family Campus completion caps off Irvine’s recent hospital boom, in which $4 billion in investments added 371 beds between City of Hope, UCI Health and Hoag this past year.

When City of Hope’s Cancer Specialty Hospital opened in December on Sand Canyon Avenue, less than four miles east of Hoag Irvine, it made available 73 inpatient beds devoted to myriad types of cancer. Two years prior, City of Hope opened its large outpatient care center on the same campus.

UCI Health — Irvine’s all-electric hospital also opened in December, bringing another 144 beds to the area and expanding acute patient care on Irvine’s west end, roughly a 15-minute drive from Hoag’s Sun Family Campus. UCI Health’  Joe C. Wen & Family Center for Advanced Care had previously opened at the Jamboree Road medical complex, offering outpatient services.

“If you combine what they bring to the region and what we already have existing here, the whole menu of treatment is available,” Greater Irvine Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Dave Coffaro said.

“Whether it’s preventative types of care at the wellness center, the Samueli Integrative Health Institute at UCI, where a lot of that’s preventive to chronic diseases and cancer and things like that, with City of Hope and Hoag kind of picking up space in between,” Coffaro said, “you’ve got this amazing breadth of services for preventive, quality of health and chronic health treatments.”

The recent hospital boom has meant a massive hiring wave as staffing ramped up, but has also strengthened the synergy between Irvine’s hospitals and med-tech companies, giving them reasons to stay local and elevate the county’s level of care, Coffaro said.

In 2023, the Irvine Greater Chamber of Commerce published a study that said of the 1,552 major device and equipment companies in the state, more than 235, or roughly 15%, are in Orange County. And of that percentage, some of the biggest companies, such as Edwards Lifesciences and Masimo, are headquartered in Irvine.

“In economics terms, it’s the whole supply chain. We’ve got it all here,” Coffaro said. “We’re looking at the whole ecosystem.”

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