President John Hennessey announced a $1 billion Campaign for Stanford Medicine on Monday. The campaign, which is already halfway to its goal with pledges and expectancies, will raise funds for a new hospital and new programs aimed at changing health care on a national and global level.
The new facility will sit on the current hospital’s site in Palo Alto, but will be updated to meet California seismic standards. Programs in the new facility will try to incorporate new technologies into health care to guide medicine into the future. Construction will begin on the site in 2013.
“Providing the most advanced health care possible to people — locally, nationally and globally — will be one of the great challenges of this century,” Hennessy said in a press release. “The Campaign for Stanford Medicine draws upon our particular strengths — the proximity of the university to its hospitals and clinics — to focus on this issue and better serve the public. It will allow us to seek solutions to some of medicine’s most daunting problems, and it will begin in our own community with the new Stanford Hospital.”
Stanford announced in February 2011 that companies from Silicon Valley, including Hewlett-Packard, Apple, eBay, Intel, Intuit and Oracle, would donate to a campaign called the Stanford Hospital Corporate Partners Program. NVIDIA also pledged to the program in April, bringing the total from the program to $175 million from corporate partners.
In addition, three individual families each contributed $50 million to the hospital: Tashia and John Morgridge, Anne Bass M.A. ‘07 and Robert Bass MBA ‘74, and the Christopher Redlich ‘72 family. Morgridge was formerly CEO of Cisco Systems. Robert Bass is president of Keystone Group LP, founder of the Oak Hill investment funds and chairman of the Aerion Corporation. Redlich was formerly chair of Marine Terminals Corporation.
The new hospital will be structured as four patient care pavilions. The Redlich family and the Morgridges will each name one of the four pavilions.
According to Stanford News Service, new technologies being put in place at the hospital include advanced imaging and “hybrid” treatment platforms equipped for many types of procedures.
The new hospital will also advance Stanford’s emergency service offerings, creating 59 treatment bays for emergency patients.
The 823,000-square-foot hospital is scheduled to open in 2018.
-Matt Bettonville