LA JOLLA, Calif. — The new Jacobs Medical Center at UC San Diego Health in La Jolla opened on Nov. 20, 2016. Construction began in 2012, and the center was named in recognition of a $75 million gift from the Joan and Irwin Jacobs family. The 245-bed new medical center brings cutting-edge technology for cancer treatment and other specialty care.

The 509,500-square-foot 10-story facility had a budget of $943 million. Architecture and interior design were provided as a collaboration between the Yazdani Studio of Cannon Design in Los Angeles and Cannon Design’s Los Angeles Office. The general contractor was Kitchell Contractors out of their San Diego and Phoenix, Ariz. offices.

The Jacobs Medical Center will contribute to meet the healthcare needs of San Diego County — San Diego is California’s second-most populated city, with 3.3 million residents, and 17 percent fewer acute-care beds per 100,000 residents compared to the statewide average, according to a statement. The medical center includes three specialty centers: one for women and infants, a cancer center, and an advanced surgery center.

The design team created over 60 design concepts with a wide range of configurations and relationships to other buildings on the campus throughout the process, according to William D. Hamilton, AIA, principal at Cannon Design. “The scheme continually changed over time, with the footprint and building envelope being driven by the number of beds per unit, and the number of rooms with windows and daylight defining the floorplate.”

The surgical center has 14 operating rooms with an advanced surgical suite of four operating rooms. The center also has an MRI and 64-slice CT scanner for real-time imaging. The medical center houses a cancer center with 108 beds in addition to its 245 acute-care beds. There is an entire floor in the cancer center dedicated to blood and bone marrow transplant surgery and recovery. One of the state-of-the-art features of the cancer center is a floor that receives specially filtered air to help protect patients with compromised immune systems, according to a statement.

The hospital also houses an intensive-care unit with 36 beds in family-friendly rooms, 36 postpartum beds and a 52-room, neonatal intensive-care unit. Each room in the birth center has its own built-in birthing tub. There is even a “serenity room” in the hospital, beautifully designed with wooden curved benches and walls that promote relaxation through their design.

The Jacobs Medical Center is a triangular building, with a unique curvilinear design, and is connected by footbridges to UCSD’s Thornton Hospital on the La Jolla campus. “The geometry creates a subtle continuous flowing curve of the exterior — a dynamic form that changes as one passes around the building’s perimeter,” said Hamilton. Most rooms at the hospital have floor-to-ceiling windows to maximize natural light with panoramic views of San Diego, and gardens outside the facility designed to promote healing.

There are dedicated family areas with lounges and kitchenettes on each inpatient floor, and outdoor terraces and courtyards. Every floor and patient room is decorated with the 150-piece art collection donated by philanthropist Joan Jacobs that includes paintings, photographs and sculptures by renowned artists. There is a rooftop helicopter landing pad, and the building has a low-carbon footprint that meets the requirements for LEED-Silver certification.

Some LEED-Silver features of the hospital include a drought-tolerant plantings and sprawling green space at the ground level and at the patient level via raised gardens, according to Hamilton. The overall curvilinear form of the hospital maximizes daylight and minimizes solar gain and glare. Fritted glass serves as buffer to the southern sunlight, minimizing the building’s cooling output. The building is in close proximity to bus and light-rail transit, provides designated parking for low-emitting vehicles, and includes bike storage and changing rooms to encourage alternative transportation.

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“We are making good progress in narrowing the differences between our offer and the City’s request of us,” says Kevin McCormick, a spokesperson at Sutter Health, a part of CPMC. “We are hopeful that those remaining differences will soon be resolved and that we can then present this agreement to the San Francisco Planning Commission and get their support for our plans.”

The San Francisco Business Times reported this summer that this $1.1 billion figure came after city officials asked for nearly $2 billion in additional commitments from CPMC to gain the required approval for its huge capital projects. CPMC’s earlier proposals had come under fire from the mayor as well as union groups such as the California Nurses Association.

McCormack says the $1.1 billion community benefit plan commits CPMC to contributing $86 million a year for ten years in health care for uninsured, poor and low-income San Franciscans. It also includes Medi-Cal and MediCare patients and patients enrolled in Healthy San Francisco, the City’s safety net health program.

“We also committed to creating a new CPMC Center for Tenderloin Health that would work with community-based physicians to help their patients find the most appropriate care at CPMC, and navigate their way through our system,” says McCormack.  “We would also create a Center for Excellence in Community Health and a Center for Excellence in Senior Health at our rebuilt St. Luke’s Campus.”

He adds that CPMC has offered $50 million for affordable housing, workforce hiring and development, public transportation improvements and pedestrian safety on top of the additional $1.9 billion of its own money — with no taxpayer funds involved — to build two earthquake-safe, state-of-the-art hospitals at Van Ness and Geary and at its St. Luke’s campus.

“These will ensure that the City has hospital beds available even in the aftermath of a major disaster. For CPMC, we get to rebuild our hospitals and make them safer for both patients and staff and create a new world class system of care.”

He adds that by building these new hospitals, CPMC not only creates seismically safe facilities, but can also provide private patient rooms. “This is better not just from the perspective of a patient’s comfort, but also means we can do a much better job of infection control.”

If built, the new Cathedral Hill complex would be CPMC’s main specialist care hospital. It would house heart, liver, kidney transplant teams, cardiac specialists and interventional endoscopies, as well as many other inpatient surgical specialties. It will also be a Women and Children’s hospital with an expanded labor and delivery unit, as well as a neonatal intensive care unit and pediatric care units.

Meanwhile, a rebuild at St. Luke’s Hospital would entail a new campus at Van Ness and Geary (several miles away) with an expanded emergency department and 50 percent more room than at the present, as well as an enhanced labor and delivery unit, general surgery and orthopedic surgery.

“In short, all the acute care services that we currently have at St. Luke’s will remain there with the exception of pediatrics,” says McCormack. “There is, on average, only one pediatric patient a day at St. Luke’s and that is not enough to maintain a skilled/experienced staff.  We think it makes more sense from a health care delivery perspective to have that child cared for at the Van Ness/Geary campus.”

Over the next decade, CPMC’s plans are to create a city-wide system of care with the goal of delivering care to the people of San Francisco as close to their home as possible.

“For instance our Bayview Child Health Center cares for the children of the Bayview/Hunter’s Point community in their own neighborhood,” says McCormack. “In the past, most of those children had to travel for miles outside their community to see a pediatrician. And the new CPMC Center for Tenderloin Health is meant to provide a similar service in the Tenderloin, currently one of the most medically underserved parts of San Francisco.”

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The new hospital is expected to be completed in 2014 and will house a 183-bed children’s facility with emergency and pediatric primary care and specialty outpatient facilities; a 70-bed adult hospital for cancer patients; and a women’s hospital with specialty surgery and select outpatient services, and a 36-bed birthing center. Also located on the site will be an energy plant and helipad.

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