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Monday, Mar 18, 2024
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UCSD Hospital Breaks Ground

Sleek architectural renderings of UC San Diego Health System’s future medical center in La Jolla are what first caught the attention of Irwin Jacobs more than two years ago.

“The plans looked and sounded very interesting,” said Jacobs, who returned home from a UC San Diego Foundation meeting eager to share news of the proposed 10-story hospital with his wife, Joan Jacobs. “The more we learned about it, the more excited we became.”

Jacobs, co-founder and former head of San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc., said he and Joan agreed that UCSD and the regional health care ecosystem would benefit from a major academic hospital located right on campus.

Currently, the university health system’s main teaching hospital — the 386-bed UCSD Medical Center — is located in the downtown Hillcrest neighborhood, which provides some logistical challenges for students.

And UCSD’s on-campus Thornton Hospital, a “general medical-surgical facility” is relatively small, at 119 beds, Joan Jacobs noted. “It’s about time the focus turned” to the La Jolla campus, she said.

Construction Begins

Construction on the 509,000-square-foot medical center officially begins this week adjacent to Thornton Hospital, just north of La Jolla Village Drive and east of Interstate 5.

It’s scheduled to open for patient care by December 2016. The total project cost is estimated at about $670 million, according to UCSD.

The new building, to be called the Jacobs Medical Center, will have more than twice Thornton’s capacity, at 245 beds. It will focus on specialty care, with a birthing center, neonatal intensive care unit, 36 ICU beds, 14 operating rooms and a “hospital within a hospital” that’s devoted to inpatient cancer care.

To top it off, literally, will be a helicopter landing pad with direct access to all floors.

So even for a philanthropic family that doesn’t normally gravitate toward medicine, Jacobs said the $75 million gift — the largest gift ever made to the UCSD Health System — was an easy decision for him and his wife.

“This will be a more sophisticated medical building,” said Jacobs.

Irwin Jacobs has been closely involved with UCSD since 1966, when he and his young family relocated to La Jolla from Boston to help shape the then-new university’s engineering curriculum. The Jacobs family has provided a total of more than $200 million in support to UCSD, including a $110 million gift in 2003 for the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering.

“It’s clear that to have a really major impact — local, state, national and international — UCSD needs larger, modern facilities, with the ability to bring a lot of the new research into patient care more quickly,” said Jacobs. “All of that will be accomplished with this health center.”

David Beech, a consultant in the health care practice at Barney & Barney LLC in San Diego, said the new center will help treat an aging population, “with an eye toward new technologies and procedures most appropriate for a teaching and research institution.”

“This should help solidify San Diego’s reputation as a world-class health care provider in the SoCal marketplace,” Beech said.

Doing Things Differently

David Allen Brenner, vice chancellor for UCSD Health Sciences and dean of the School of Medicine, said the project is already helping San Diego’s only medical school recruit top doctors who otherwise would go to work at places like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore or Mayo Clinic, based in Rochester, Minn.

“These amazing physicians would not come here if they were going to be practicing in the Hillcrest hospital,” Brenner said in a matter-of-fact way. The hospital will employ 750 people.

In the Midwest and Northeast, health care consumers understand and embrace the concept of academic medicine, he said. “We don’t have that culture here yet, but we’re clearly changing it,” Brenner said.

San Diego is missing “the high-power, state-of-the-art clinical care that a city of this size and stature should have,” he said. “We view (Jacobs Medical Center) as an integral part of our overall vision for the university and for San Diego.”

Part of what makes the planned teaching hospital unique is its design, which incorporates plenty of room for researchers in close proximity to patients, Joan Jacobs said.

The idea is to promote “translational” medicine, allowing research innovations to be incorporated quickly into patient care, she said. “There are a lot of opportunities to do things differently here,” she said. That ranges from incorporating the latest in wireless health innovation to reduce readmission rates, to improving food-service.

Joan Jacobs, a Cornell University-trained dietician, is personally involved in shaping the hospital’s menu offerings. All of the food will be cooked on the premises, rather than at an off-site kitchen commissary, she said.

“Patients care about that and it helps in the healing,” she said.

The hospital also will feature a “garden” design allowing for optimal natural light and “smart walls,” which are wall-sized video screens, in patient rooms.

UCSD said it plans to continue operating its Hillcrest hospital, which is home to the region’s only burn center and one of only five adult trauma facilities in the county. The university spent $80 million in upgrades at the Hillcrest hospital in 2010.

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