Around this time last year, Chief Operating Officer Annette Morgan was focused on one of City of Hope Orange County’s most significant achievements: the opening of its cancer specialty hospital.

“I feel like I’m in such a different state of mind given that we made it through state license survey and things are a little bit less chaotic,” Morgan told the Business Journal.

The six-story, 174,000-square-foot facility is the newest piece of City of Hope’s growing 72-acre Irvine campus, which includes the Lennar Foundation Cancer Center outpatient facility that opened in 2022.

City of Hope in 2019 announced that it would invest $1.5 billion to increase cancer care in Orange County, aiming to reduce the number of patients traveling outside the region for treatment.

Morgan received the Business Journal’s Women in Business Award last year for overseeing the planning, design, activation and growth of City of Hope’s local network.

She joined the organization in 2018 as the second employee after spending a combined seven years as an executive at Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Orange and Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo.

Hospital Ramps Up Staffing
Since opening in December, the hospital has served 3,500 patients to date, according to Morgan.

Morgan said opening the hospital was a major milestone, but the work is far from finished.
“We’ve moved from getting ready to opening to now focusing on how do we continue to expand access,” she said.

So far, they’ve hired around 700 staff with plans to add 100 more positions.
“We’re in that phase of continuing to build relationships across staff and departments and continuing to open more beds to serve more patients,” Morgan said.

To help accommodate the growing workforce, philanthropist Ron Simon’s nonprofit, RSI Dream Communities, gifted $25 million to City of Hope last October to secure future land for workforce housing.

RSI is also providing $1.25 million in rent subsidies a year until land becomes available.
About 160 employees have been approved to recieve subsidies, allowing them to remain living locally.

Connected Care
With the hospital connected to the Lennar outpatient cancer center, patients now have access to an evaluation and treatment center.

“That has made a huge difference for our patients because when Lennar was open as a standalone, if we had a patient who had some sort of issue in the middle of the night, they ended up going to another hospital’s emergency department,” Morgan said.

The new hospital has also allowed City of Hope to offer higher-acuity services closer to home including cellular therapies, gastrointestinal (GI) and thoracic surgery programs.

“The reason those launched when we opened the hospital is that oftentimes they’re higher-risk treatments and patients need 24/7 support,” she said.

Morgan said that City of Hope is currently focused on expanding access to its hematology program for patients with leukemia, myeloma and lymphoma.