When Mayor Larry Agran moved to Irvine in 1975, it was to support his wife in her breakthrough admission to the UC Irvine School of Medicine as part of one of the first classes to include women.
Agran has since served on the Irvine City Council on and off for the better part of five decades — and from the dais, witnessed the city’s health-care evolution.
He was on the council when the city’s first hospital, Irvine Medical Center — later Irvine Regional Hospital — opened in 1988 at Alton Parkway and Sand Canyon Road and when it was acquired in 2010 by Hoag. In 2008, Agran and residents saw Kaiser Permanente open its $370 million hospital complex across the street.
But this is an even bigger month for Irvine.
The city is helping celebrate City of Hope and UCI Health as they open two new hospitals — and next year it will be at Hoag’s expansion opening three new health institutes on its campus.
This boom in new health-care options for residents “is really the culmination of 20 or 30 years of vast planning and work initially by the major developers. First, the Irvine Company and, later, FivePoint communities,” Agran said. “And we’re just now realizing the benefits of all of the planning that went before.”
The billions of dollars in investments coming online more than double the number of hospital beds in the city, add thousands of jobs and speak to what Agran characterizes as Irvine’s burgeoning into “one of the huge, biomedical, biotechnical hospital centers in the entire United States.”
“We have become that,” he said. “And certainly, with the opening of the new hospitals, that just confirms it.”
Read also: Hospital openings in Irvine mean lots of new hiring in region
Groundwork laid
Opening its 144-bed hospital on Wednesday will be “fulfilling a promise” made when the university and its medical school were first being established, UCI Health officials said.
A medical center on its campus, a place for academic medicine and community care, had been part of the plan from the beginning.
But with funding problems and opposition from then-Gov. Jerry Brown, the UC Regents instead purchased in 1976 the Orange County Hospital in the city of Orange for $5.5 million and renamed it the UC Irvine Medical Center.
Now, in time for the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the UCI Health system, which has also acquired additional hospitals around Orange County – and not just a medical school on campus, but also schools for nursing and pharmacy – that decades-old promise, UCI Health spokesperson John Murray said, “is being fulfilled in the growth and maturation of the university’s health and medical enterprises.”
When the UCI Health – Irvine hospital takes in its first patient next week, it will be the nation’s first all-electric hospital, marking “a sort of homecoming, a return to our roots on the Irvine campus,” Murray said.
With UCI opening in 1965 and Irvine incorporating in 1971, the university and its host city are inextricably linked.
“If you look at the growth of the city, the city was designed around the university. There’s a lot of new innovation that comes out of UCI medical and the various schools, engineering, and that creates a lot of medtech,” Irvine Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Dave Coffaro said.
“That leads to a tremendous supply of both new research on helping deal with long-term issues that humans have had since the beginning of time, and not only new treatments, but new technologies to help with those treatments,” he said.
Irvine and the greater Orange County area have become prominent players in the medical technology industry; of the 1,552 major medical device and equipment companies in the state, more than 235 are in Orange County, according to the Greater Irvine Chamber of Commerce.
And some of the biggest companies have campuses in Irvine, said Coffaro, “Johnson and Johnson, Edwards Lifesciences, and so forth.”
“But then, we’ve got some fabulous, smaller ones that are up and coming, and they’re growing and creating new jobs,” he added.
The health-care industry in Orange County employs nearly 200,000 people working for some 17,500 establishments. And, the industry has doubled its employment over the past 20 years, according to the Orange County Business Council.
“If you look at the largest employers in Orange County, you have UC Irvine, which would include UCI Health. You have Providence, Kaiser Permanente, Hoag, CHOC, Edwards Lifesciences — all of these are related to health care,” said Jeffrey Ball, the Orange Council Business Council president and CEO.
“So many of the innovations that are happening in health care, a lot of that is originating here,” Ball said. “With that foundation, I think it brings an opportunity for this increased investment in the provision of health care.”
Addressing county needs
Another factor driving this boom in health-care investment: demographics.
Orange County has approximately 3.2 million residents and the fastest-growing age group is those 65 and older. Older adults increased from 11.7% of the county population to 16.4% between 2010 and 2022, according to census data.
With an older population, Ball said, comes a “higher level of health-care needs.”
And, Irvine is one of the country’s fastest-growing cities. From its beginnings in the early 1970s with about 7,000 residents, Irvine’s population has now grown to more than 310,000, just second in the county behind Anaheim.
Irvine, known for its master-planned communities, continues to see housing growth with the emerging neighborhoods around the Great Park, residential development in previous commercial districts, an affordable-housing push and other redevelopment projects.
The city of more than 117,000 housing units is expected to add more than 50,000 additional homes by 2045. Its population has increased about 100% since 2000, growing at an annual rate of about 18.5% as more housing comes online.
A growing population, paired with ongoing investments, creates a need for more health care, said Robert Braithwaite, Hoag’s president and CEO.
“Within the first couple years of operating (in Irvine), it was about 2013 when we realized that the current footprint for the hospital was too small, given the size of the community it was serving,” Braithwaite said. “It’s just simple demographics and the projections on the demographics, if you look over 20 years, we just knew that it was not sized. It needed more and more facilities and technology.”
When Hoag’s Sun Family Campus expansion opens in 2026, it will reap more than $1 billion in investments with six new buildings, institutes dedicated to digestive health, cancer and women’s health, a 24-hour cancer urgent care and double the number of hospital beds.
City of Hope’s nearby expansion into Orange County was also prompted by a population-driven, community need.
The not-for-profit cancer research and treatment center accepted an invitation from FivePoint founder Emile Haddad to come to the city and establish a 72-acre medical campus next to the Great Park and the community of more than 10,550 homes the developer is building at the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro.
“Emile had a vision that the area of Irvine we were in would become a center of health innovation, and he was looking for a flagship organization to be the convener of what else could grow up around it,” City of Hope Orange County President Annette Walker said.
The Great Park Neighborhoods development that spans roughly 2,100 acres is less than a 10-minute drive from City of Hope for the more than 6,000 families that live there.
Haddad envisioned a cancer center that would improve the quality of life for those residents and spare patients in this region the arduous commute to City of Hope’s founding campus in Duarte.
That vision by Haddad prompted a $1.5 billion investment from City of Hope and its donors, which began with the opening of an outpatient cancer treatment center in 2022. Next was the Dec. 1 opening of the county’s first cancer specialty hospital with 73 beds and a staff of more than 700.
“With Orange County’s aging population and a rising increase in cancer incidence rates and diagnoses affecting younger and diverse populations, there was a shared sense of urgency to expand City of Hope’s capabilities even further,” FivePoint CEO Dan Hedigan said of City of Hope’s acquisition last year of another 52 acres for future expansion.
“This investment advances the mission even further to bring highly specialized cancer research, treatment and cures to Orange County,” he added. “As a developer and designer of large-scale communities, it is important to integrate best-in-class health care into Great Park Neighborhoods because maintaining good health and overall wellness is foundational to creating a sustainable community.”
Inside City Hall
Recognizing that the ever-growing Irvine was going to need more health-care services for its residents, City Hall prepared itself to help make the investments happen, officials said.
City staffers helped the providers right-size their plans for meeting needs and tried to ensure there was planning for the housing, transportation and other infrastructure so much investment would require, City Manager Sean Crumby said.
“What the city has tried to do is work with all of these partners, including a lot of their satellite functions, universities, medical leaders, to really just ensure that we can be helpful through their process entitlements and through their process of constructions for them to be here in Irvine,” he said. “We’ve done things like expedited reviews and coordination, making sure that there is infrastructure that is positioned to handle any of the demands that they throw at us.”
To build its campus, Braithwaite said Hoag worked closely with the city and community organizations to pinpoint the area’s health-care needs.
“We got a lot of the data and the demographics that existed inside the city and used all of that to project forward,” Braithwaite said. “So the city was very instrumental in helping us do that, certainly contributing quantitatively, and from support.”
But there’s still plenty to be done, Crumby said. Ongoing, pressing concerns are transportation and affordable housing for the incoming workforce.
But Agran said the city is well-equipped for the situation.
“Every once in a while,” he said, “I just kind of shake my head in realization of what is actually happening before our very eyes right now.”