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After more than a decade in the making, Stanford University’s new $2 billion, state-of-the-art hospital — propped above a moat and coasters that will allow it to ride out a big earthquake — is just weeks away from welcoming its first patients.
At a dedication ceremony on Wednesday morning, more than 300 university leaders, medical staff, donors, elected officials and community members gathered to celebrate the hospital’s near completion.
“For so long, the new Stanford Hospital seemed like a distant dream,” David Entwistle, Stanford Health Care president and CEO, told the audience. “…We are here today because of the thousands of hours of effort from dedicated individuals that made this event — and the vision of what we envision health care to be — a reality.”
The new seven-story, 824,000-square-foot facility, which officially open its doors on Nov. 17, will accommodate more patients than the older one and offer the latest technology.
It also was designed to sustain a shift of three feet in each direction. About 30 feet below ground level, large steel and teflon coasters — called isolators — sit under columns that support the building, taking a few million pounds of pressure off its weight during an earthquake and enabling the sliding to occur. A moat under the entire building aids in the motion effect.
The new facility features 368 individual patient rooms, 20 operating rooms, an emergency department with twice as much floor space as the hospital’s current one and a parking structure that holds 900 spaces.
The facility features large outdoor seating spaces, gardens and walking trails for patients and visitors as well as commissioned artwork scattered throughout the halls and facility grounds.
Rafael Viñoly, the architect behind the new facility, said it was the “kind of thing that could only happen at Stanford.”
“It’s completely connected to the idea of place — both physically and in the ethos of the place — a place in which there’s a strong combination of freedom and opportunity, which generates this extraordinary amount of innovation,” Vinoly said in an interview.
Unlike the university’s current hospital, the new facility will be filled with private rooms, as opposed to double-occupancy rooms. Each room consists of large windows that span its length, space for family members to visit and stay and screens that patients can use to track their test results, upcoming operations and overall care profile.
“It really puts the emphasis on where it should be, and that’s the patients and their families,” said Lloyd B. Minor, dean of Stanford School of Medicine. “And then we bring the technology, the science and the people together around the patients and their families to provide the very best care.”
From sensors throughout the building that help patients navigate the hospital quickly, to a new messaging platform that allows them to interact with their physicians in real-time to devices that give patients the ability to order food and control the temperature in their room, the hospital is overflowing with technology aimed to make the health care process efficient and convenient.
Stanford’s new hospital will be the only Level 1 Trauma Center between San Francisco and San Jose for adults, offering critical resources and specialists around the clock.
Palo Alto Vice Mayor Adrian Fine, who spoke at Wednesday’s ceremony, said that the hospital was “truly a blessing” for the thousands of San Mateo and Santa Clara County residents that make up more than two-thirds of the hospitals’ patients.
“Having a world-class hospital right here in our neighborhood and backyard, delivering care informed by the latest research and discoveries, is an immense benefit to those of us who call the Bay Area home,” Fine said.
Beginning next month, patients in the university’s current hospital will be moved over to the new facility. And starting next year, the university will begin renovating parts of the old hospital to meet the latest seismic standards and convert double-occupancy rooms into private rooms. Entwistle, Stanford Health Care CEO, estimated that the renovation project will take four to five years to complete.
“It’s neat to see this finally delivered to our community,” Entwistle said in an interview Wednesday. “Whether you’re in Palo Alto or Menlo Park, San Jose or across the world — it’s amazing the number of patients we see, and so being able to have the facilities and technology to give our patients what they need is really what we’re here for.”
