{"id":63686,"date":"2025-10-06T17:13:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T17:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/63686\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T17:13:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T17:13:08","slug":"hoag-physicians-see-campus-expansion-project-as-opportunity-orange-county-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/63686\/","title":{"rendered":"Hoag physicians see campus expansion project as opportunity \u2013 Orange County Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hoag leaders make a bold promise as they prepare to open the hospital\u2019s $1 billion Sun Family Campus in Irvine next September: Come to Hoag and you won\u2019t have to travel anywhere else for care.<\/p>\n

Once it opens, Hoag\u2019s expansion will feature<\/a> six new buildings, including a dedicated women\u2019s hospital, a surgical pavilion and a digestive health and cancer institute. The campus will include 155 inpatient beds, 11 operating rooms, 24 labor, delivery, recovery and postpartum suites, a 17-bed NICU, robotic-assisted surgery, a worship center, a wellness park \u2014 and the list goes on.<\/p>\n

Hoag isn\u2019t the only one growing in Irvine. This year and next, major health players \u2014 including City of Hope and UC Irvine \u2014 are set to add millions of square feet of new hospital and health education space. By decade\u2019s end, Irvine could be one of the nation\u2019s most health-focused communities<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So as construction work continues on Hoag\u2019s Irvine campus, the doctors leading three specialities that will have homes there, women\u2019s health, digestive health and cancer care, sat recently for a roundtable discussion on what the expansion will allow their health care teams to do and what will set Hoag apart.<\/p>\n

For starters, Dr. Steven Grossman, the lead of the hospital\u2019s cancer institute, said a new 24\/7 cancer urgent care center will be there for cancer patients across Orange County.<\/p>\n

\u201cShow up if you have cancer and you have a problem that needs attention anytime of the day, certainly in the middle of the night, weekends and holidays,\u201d he said. \u201cOur facility is going to be open to everybody, so it doesn\u2019t matter who\u2019s treating you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cancer patients often face sudden medical issues at odd hours, and Grossman said emergency rooms, including at Hoag, \u201care just not the most ideal environment for immunosuppressed cancer patients.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is certainly a differentiator throughout the county,\u201d Grossman said of the 24\/7 cancer urgent care center.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The newly redesigned front entrance at Hoag Hospital Irvine is part of the Sun Family Campus Expansion in Irvine on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/p>\n

Dr. Allyson Brooks who specializes in women\u2019t health is shown at the newly redesigned front entrance at Hoag Hospital Irvine, which is part of the Sun Family Campus Expansion in Irvine, on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/p>\n

Dr. Kenneth Chang who specializes in digestive health is shown at the newly redesigned front entrance at Hoag Hospital Irvine, which is part of the Sun Family Campus Expansion in Irvine, on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

\"Cancer<\/p>\n

Cancer specialist Dr. Steve Grossman is shown at the newly redesigned front entrance at Hoag Hospital Irvine, which is part of the Sun Family Campus Expansion in Irvine, on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

Show Caption<\/p>\n

1 of 4<\/p>\n

The newly redesigned front entrance at Hoag Hospital Irvine is part of the Sun Family Campus Expansion in Irvine on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register\/SCNG)\n<\/p>\n

Expand<\/a><\/p>\n

He added that the expansion allows Hoag to provide more specialized care than most community hospitals. Rather than having oncologists treat multiple types of cancer, Hoag will have doctors focusing exclusively on a single cancer type, whether lung, stomach, breast or blood cancer \u2014 offering experts in just about every cancer.<\/p>\n

Dr. Allyson Brooks, a Hoag physician since 1993, said the Irvine hospital\u2019s model is designed so families can get multiple types of care without leaving the community. Patients can receive screenings, imaging, doctor consultations, surgery and access clinical trials \u2014 all on the same campus, she said.<\/p>\n

Brooks, who leads Hoag\u2019s women\u2019s health institute, said she envisions the Sun Family Campus will \u201callow women to feel that we can take care of them all in one location, her and her children, her spouse or partner in life, her parents, so that the family doesn\u2019t need to leave the community where they live, where they work, where they have connections and support.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that the most important thing is that people won\u2019t need to leave home, they won\u2019t need to leave Orange County. They\u2019ll be able to come right here, and they\u2019ll be able to get here from the 405 or the 5 or the 133 or they can fly in as a destination into John Wayne Airport,\u201d she added. \u201cSo we see it as something for the entire family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond treatment, Hoag plans to expand preventive care, the physicians emphasized.<\/p>\n

Dr. Kenneth Chang joined Hoag last summer from UC Irvine with the ambitious goal to launch Orange County\u2019s largest digestive health institute<\/a>, turn the community hospital into a research leader and, ultimately, eliminate esophageal and colon cancer in Orange County.<\/p>\n

And that begins with preventative care, focusing on symptoms he calls \u201cpre-cancer\u201d and \u201cpre-pre-cancer,\u201d such as obesity, diabetes and even heartburn.<\/p>\n

\u201cLooking at (cancer) from, say, a community point of view, obviously, a person walking in the door with various cancers, we\u2019re going to strive to provide all the treatments, standard of care, clinical trials for a phase 1, 2, 3, 4 cancer. But we\u2019re dreaming bigger than that. We\u2019re dreaming about how do we actually decrease the cancer prevalence incidence in Orange County,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The idea is for Hoag\u2019s new weight and metabolic center to offer the full spectrum of care in one place, from behavioral and mental health support to smart food choices and meal prep, as well as endoscopic and surgical procedures, so that when a patient walks in, they receive care \u201cwithout having to worry about which center that person needs to tap into\u201d next, Chang said.<\/p>\n

Preventive care can also look simpler, he said.<\/p>\n

Chang said Hoag\u2019s marketing team created a free, 20-question assessment anyone can complete online or through an app. The tool will evaluate a person\u2019s risk for developing cancer and other conditions, then provide guidance based on their risk level.<\/p>\n

The tool will be able to offer personalized recommendations, from diet and exercise to medications, including what to eat, what not to eat and how to eat.<\/p>\n

Chang said Hoag is also tailoring care to the ethnic composition of its surrounding community. He noted that liver and stomach cancers disproportionately affect the Asian population, unlike the top cancers for the U.S. population overall, which are lung, colon and pancreatic.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur leadership is poised to look at that and to provide that kind of care, education, awareness, and again, the same depth of care that you would see in top-level hospitals in Asia,\u201d he said. \u201cSo our advanced liver program is hyper-focused on (Hepatocellular carcinoma) liver cancer and how to screen for it, how to detect it, how to treat it minimally invasively, all the way to surgery and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Grossman says that kind of focus has helped Hoag recruit top physicians from across the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople just want to come here,\u201d he said, \u201cwhether I\u2019m talking to PhD researchers, physicians, physician scientists, advanced practice providers, there\u2019s something magnetic about this place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally Published: October 6, 2025 at 7:08 AM PDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hoag leaders make a bold promise as they prepare to open the hospital\u2019s $1 billion Sun Family Campus…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63687,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[811,103,397,396,43714,61,60,43715,1529,43,43716,38],"class_list":{"0":"post-63686","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-health-care","11":"tag-healthcare","12":"tag-hoag-hospital","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-irvine","16":"tag-local-news","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-orange-county","19":"tag-top-stories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}