Modesto Bee Article
By Ken Carlson, Staff Reporter
last updated: September 18, 2008 03:41:10 AM
For two years, the Kaiser Permanente medical center, with its five-story towers and slick rotunda, has dominated the landscape of northwest Modesto.
On Oct. 1, the long-awaited hospital on Dale Road, near Kiernan Avenue, opens to expand medical services for Kaiser's 261,000 members in Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties. It is Modesto's third full-service hospital and the first to open since Memorial Medical Center emerged in 1970.
The hospital will make its debut with 112 beds in private rooms, a birthing center, emergency department, digitally equipped surgery rooms and an electronic records system connecting the hospital to other Kaiser facilities.
Another 112 private rooms are reserved on the top floors, which are shelled in for future use.
Kaiser officials said a hurdle was cleared last week when the hospital passed state regulatory inspections that could have put things on hold.
Combined with a specialty clinic support wing that opened to patients in 2006, the center has nearly 670,000 square feet and comes at a $430 million price tag, representatives said.
"It has the core services of any hospital," said Corwin Harper, senior vice president and Central Valley area manager for Kaiser.
The center not only provides a full-service hospital for Kaiser's membership, but a local resource "in the form of an emergency department for the community," he said.
Serving valley since 1985
The hospital opening is a milestone for Kaiser in this part of the Central Valley, where it opened a clinic in Stockton in 1985 and began contracting with Stanislaus County physicians to serve members in 1996.
It announced plans for the hospital in December 2002 as part of a $500 million medical complex later dubbed Kaiser Modesto Medical Center. In the next seven months, Kaiser opened its own facilities in Modesto, including the Bangs Avenue medical offices and a two-story office building at 3800 Dale Road.
The medical office wing at the north Modesto campus started serving patients in October 2006. It is joined with the hospital by a rotunda that allows patients and staff to pass between the two buildings.
The Kaiser health system is primarily for patients enrolled in its health plans, which causes some to question the overall benefits the hospital will bring to health care in the area.
Dr. John Walker, public health officer for Stanislaus County, praised Kaiser for increasing the availability of medical care through its clinics and getting involved with public health initiatives.
He reserved judgment on whether the medical center will help relieve emergency-room crowding at hospitals in the area. Will the emergency department accept its share of ambulance patients when other hospitals go on diversion?
"I hope in their emergency department they will be seeing people without reference to whether they are Kaiser patients," Walker said. "This hospital will be a consolidation of services for Kaiser patients, but we'll have to wait to see what it does for us overall as a county."
Built on a hospital 'template'
The Modesto center differs from older Kaiser hospitals in the Bay Area and other hospitals in Stanislaus County. It was designed on the same "template" as Kaiser hospitals in Antioch and Irvine, which were put on a fast track to meet earthquake requirements and patient demand.
The hospital was completed by mid-2007, but the opening date was delayed a year while Kaiser focused on opening the Antioch and Irvine hospitals, representatives said.
