Lucile Packard Children's celebrates 25 years by looking ahead to new opportunities

As Lucile Packard Children's Hospital celebrates its 25th anniversary Friday, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based medical center is looking to a future where it focuses on primary care as much as specialty conditions.

The hospital, which is independent but affiliated with Stanford Medicine, also is getting ready to open a new state-of-the-art facility adjacent to its current site. The building will add capacity and allow it to expand in key service areas, such as oncology, cardiology, obstetrics and fertility.

Employees who have been with the hospital since 1991 sported pink “I Opened the Doors” t-shirts during events leading up the June 10 anniversary--similar to t-shirts they wore 25 years earlier.

The hospital is celebrating more than 3 million clinic visits, 1,600 solid organ transplants and 110,000 births, said Anne McCune, Packard's chief operating officer.

Packard is looking ahead to completing most of the construction on its new building by the end of this year and admitting patients starting next year.

When the current hospital was opened, it was designed to share departments such as radiology and laboratory with the adult medical center, McCune said. But in the years that followed, operating rooms and imaging were brought under the same roof as the inpatient beds.

Meanwhile, Packard invested heavily in recruiting new faculty members, particularly in the specialty areas of heart disease, cancer, neurology, pulmonary, transplants and obstetrics. Many of those service lines will be brought into the new building. Imaging, for instance, will be connected to operating rooms so scans can be done during surgical procedures.

The children's hospital also is focused on new areas like genomics and personalized medicine as well as reproduction and fertility.

The new campus will offer 521,000 square feet of space “to manage the complexities of the future,” McCune said.

At the same time, it will continue to build its competitive advantage in core specialties.

Packard has one of the largest congenital heart disease programs in the country, and also cares for adults who were born with heart defects. The expansion will add 36 beds with a dedicated unit for pediatric heart failure and transplant, said Dr. Stephen Roth, Stanford's chief of pediatric cardiology.

Stanford gets some of the most challenging cases in the country, patients who have been told that there's nothing else that can be done for them, he added. “We've designed ourselves to handle those situations. That's kind of the ethos of the program.”

The two pavilions will add 149 inpatient and intensive care unit beds as well as expand the number of operating rooms to 13 from seven. The building will include an isotope room, one of the few children's hospitals in the country to have one. A separate room for the child's family will allow them to stay nearby during the radioactive treatment and check in over video chat.

The Silicon Valley hospital will feature a number of technology features designed to improve the patient and family experience, many of whom travel from long distances to seek care, said Jill Sullivan, Packard's vice president for hospital transformation.

It also will allow Packard to add private rooms to keep up with the competitive market.

The $1.2 billion expansion project had been under discussion since 2002.

While Packard still sees its mission as rooted in complex care, less than 2% of the population requires that degree of service, McCune said, and Packard has been deliberately expanding into primary-care services.

As more health systems combine forces and move into population health, pressure is increasing on stand-alone children's hospitals. Packard had looked at merging with Oakland Children's Hospital, but ultimately decided it was too expensive, said Chris Dawes, CEO of Stanford Children's Health. Oakland Children's has since become part of the University of California, San Francisco.

Instead Packard has been intent on growing its footprint rapidly across the Bay Area and aims to have access points within 10 miles of every Bay Area household. It has recently formed partnerships with Walnut Creek, Calif.-based John Muir Health System and San Francisco-based California Pacific Medical Center.

“What we really wanted to do is expand the Stanford medical brand and physician services into the community,” McCune said. “We're sort of the Intel inside for pediatrics at California Pacific Medical Center as well as John Muir.”

The partnerships also will support a narrow network insurance product that will be launched for technology employers starting next year.

Correction, June 14, 2016