GREENBRAE, Calif.—McCarthy Building Companies Inc. announced that the design-build contractor has completed construction on the $535 million Oak Pavilion at MarinHealth Medical Center, located in the Bay Area’s Marin County. The new healthcare facility was designed by architecture firm Perkins Eastman Architects.

The new building, which is five stories tall and encompasses 260,000 square foot of care space, features an emergency department, trauma center and an area devoted to psychiatric and “high-security” patients. The building is home to 114 private patient rooms as well as six modern operating rooms.

For this particular project, McCarthy applied its so-called EQUIP program, by which over 7,000 new pieces of medical equipment were procured, while an additional 1,169 pieces were transferred from the hospital’s existing buildings. The EQUIP model has the construction team work with vendors to ensure that equipment is tested and installed properly, so that minimal changes are needed later.

The hospital’s exterior space features gardens, many of which will be viewable to patients and healthcare staff thanks to each patient room having room-length windows.

McCarthy said that Oak Pavilion will almost certainly qualify for LEED Gold certification given that it incorporates energy-efficient and high-performance elements such as utilizing a pump chiller as the primary heating and cooling source. Furthermore, specialized silver ion filtration systems will reduce the transmission of airborne pathogens, and individual areas can be converted for isolating patients who may in fact be infectious.

Angeles Garcia, who oversaw the hospital build for McCarthy, said that staff needed a top-level facility in which to deliver and receive care, and added that Oak Pavilion will be a crown jewel in the Bay Area’s burgeoning healthcare sector.

“Since inception, every aspect of the MarinHealth Medical Center has demonstrated the team’s commitment to providing an advanced, top-quality healing environment to the community and its dedicated healthcare professionals,” Garcia said in a recent statement about the hospital.

Dr. David Klein, CEO of MarinHealth, said that the Oak Pavilion is coming online at a time when national—indeed, worldwide—healthcare is more important than ever as the medical community faces down a once-in-a-century pandemic.

“Our project partners did an amazing job of adapting to the current COVID-19 landscape, quickly and safely, to deliver an advanced, modern facility that is fully equipped to respond to the needs of the region,” Klein said in a recent statement, adding that the Oak Pavilion will be a boon to the North Bay area for decades to come.

McCarthy and its project partners worked to ensure that the new healthcare building met all relevant distancing standards that have come about in the covid-19 pandemic. And, being situated in the seismically active Golden State, the facility needed to be built to handle earthquakes as well, and thus care was taken to ensure its stability.

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The $71 million acute-care medical center, the first in Pearland, is located on a 48-acre site, and its 144,000 square feet houses 33patient beds. The medical center was built to expand patient services in Pearland and its surrounding communities. Hospital officials at Houston-based HCA Gulf Coast Division wanted to boost services in the obstetrical, surgical and cardiac areas.

The new medical center features new surgical suites, medical/surgical beds, intensive care beds and a 24-hour emergency department. It also includes imaging services such as magnetic resonance imaging, computerized tomography, a catheterization lab, echocardiogram testing and nuclear medicine modalities. A new women’s services department provides digital mammography, labor and delivery suites, C-section operating rooms and a newborn nursery.

Nashville, Tenn.-based Gould Turner Group served as the project’s architect and Skanska, based in Sweden, oversaw the construction.

“For many reasons, the ribbon-cutting will mark a major milestone for Pearland,” said Kevin Fuller, chairman of the Pearland Medical Center Board of Trustees, in a statement. “Not only will Pearland Medical Center provide quality, life-saving services; it will create jobs and economic opportunities to benefit our residents.”

Pearland is the fastest-growing community in the Houston area. The city’s population was projected to increase from 91,252 in 2010 to 123,119 in 2020 and to 141,993 in 2035, according to the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s 2013 Population and Employment Forecast. The medical center will employ about 250 full-time staff members and more than 150 physicians.

HCA-affiliated facilities in the Gulf Coast Division include 12 hospitals, eight ambulatory surgery centers, 14 diagnostic imaging facilities, eight off-campus emergency centers and a regional transfer center. The HCA Gulf Coast Division will be offering a regional transfer center that provides ground and air transportation to and from any other HCA Gulf Coast Division-affiliated hospital. That service includes transfers to specialized facilities such as Clear Lake Regional Medical Center in Webster, Texas; Houston-based Woman’s Hospital of Texas; and Houston-based Texas Orthopedic Hospital.

HCA — the parent organization for HCA Gulf Coast — is striving for sustainability in Pearland, as well as its other facility currently being built: Alliance Hospital in Dallas, which is managed by HCA North Texas. Alliance Hospital in Dallas is a three-story, $71 million hospital that is expected to open in early 2015.

Both facilities will be seeking LEED Silver certification. Fixtures in both facilities will decrease water usage by 40 percent; 95percent of construction waste will be diverted away from landfills; and wood materials used to build both facilities will all be from certified sustainable resources.

“Hospitals are an essential part of a community. They help save and improve lives, but in order for them to keep operating and providing the services their community needs, hospitals require a lot of energy which can have negative impacts on the environment,” said Greg Stein, HCA’s VP of design and construction, in a statement.

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Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), a fast-growing health industry powerhouse that runs more than 160 hospitals, is not one of these “normal” companies. Although many people feel America lost its pioneering spirit when we ran out of “new world” to discover, we still live in a society and economy that prides itself on taking risk, and gives massive rewards to those who survive those risks. HCA is definitely one of those companies that believe the risk is worth the reward and, given that it has had two governors and a senator’s family involved at various stages, it seems to have the brain trust needed to walk the regulation tight rope.

The particular risk that HCA signed up for was a policy shift in 2008, when the company changed the billing codes for the emergency rooms in its hospitals. Basically, the company changed its policies in a way that would move more emergency room patients into the column for those who need additional care. Patients in that column earn hospitals significantly more Medicare funds. HCA took a giant leap, going from an organization that had less of those patients than the industry standard, to one of the leaders. On the other side of the emergency room equation, HCA began requiring upfront pay for patients who show up at the ER with nonurgent conditions, like a turned ankle or the common cold. These adjustments address the two main issues hospitals face; too many patients never pay and too often the reimbursement hospitals do receive are not nearly significant enough to make up for that gap in funding.

HCA’s Medicaid strategy isn’t very surprising, given that it is owned by three private equity firms, including Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s highly successful company. Former U.S. Senator Bill Frist’s family also bought a sizeable share of the company, coming full circle as his father and brother originally founded the company. The other two buyers were Merrill Lynch and Kolberg Kravis Roberts. These financial companies have become extremely adept at maneuvering through the complex regulations on Wall Street, and are taking the same approach here, as the three firms have more than tripled their initial $33 billion investment.

Now that someone has taken the initial leap, other investment firms are flocking to follow HCA’s success, buying up hospitals at a rapid pace. It is hard to overstate just how much larger that leap was for HCA, which made this change despite previously settling a Medicaid fraud case for over $1.7 billion, the largest sum the government has ever gotten in a health care fraud case. The settlement was accompanied by the resignation of current Florida Governor Rick Scott from his position as chief executive at HCA, although Scott was not one of the four people indicted during the case. Though some would say HCA took a significant risk by trying to find cost savings in an area related to Medicaid funding after that incident, it has clearly penciled out so far. The company has literally gone from being featured in Forbes Disaster of the Day column to becoming an industry giant and a poster child for privatization of hospitals.

Though HCA is controversial, it currently appears to represent the future. As hospitals struggle with the financial downturn, they become more focused on two major issues, crowded emergency rooms and the constant battle to lower the financial impact of providing services for people who will never pay their bill. Until someone else comes up with a better idea, HCA’s model will probably continue to drive industry trends.

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