In an age of massive health care operations
and collaborations, how could a stand-alone,
independently run hospital hope to compete?
Health care giant Kaiser Permanente already
had a Marin enrollment estimated at 40 percent
of the county’s 255,000 residents. And MGH
had allegedly just seen $100 million disappear
from its cash reserves when the management
contract was terminated. Furthermore, the
hospital was hardly known for high morale
among its doctors and nurses. And if staff
spirits were low, some surveys indicated customer satisfaction was even lower. As if all that
wasn’t enough, Marin General, owned by the
state-established nonprofit Marin Healthcare
District, was required by law to be seismically
retrofitted within a few years, at a cost that
reached into the millions of dollars.
Enter Mill Valley’s Lee Domanico, then
57, with a B. A. in industrial engineering from
University of Michigan, a master’s degree in
the same field from Stanford and, perhaps
more important, 30 years of experience in the
rugged business of hospital administration. By
2013, after less than four years of leading the
health care district, Domanico and his staff
had given county residents (save for the areas
not in the district: Novato and portions of West
Marin) such confidence they convincingly
approved a $394 million bond issue to finance
MGH’s needed improvements and seismic retrofit. Obviously, staff and patient outlooks had
markedly improved.
So we’re all on the same page, what will the
project entail and what is the construction
sequence? Here’s how it will work: a 455-space
parking structure for our staff is already under
construction. This will free up ground parking
for patients and visitors and provide a footprint
for our new structure. The architecturally
iconic west wing building was constructed in
the 1980s, so it is seismically sound and will
remain, but will be remodeled to accommodate
57 private rooms, with an option to expand to
79 beds if needed. What we call the “east central
building,” built in the ’60s and not earthquake
safe, will be taken down and replaced with a
266,000-square-foot structure that will be
attached to the west wing and have 115 private
rooms. We’re calling that project “MGH 2.0.”
This construction should be completed in 2020.
Is that the scope of the project? Not quite. A
100,000-square-foot medical services building
and an accompanying 435-space parking structure have been approved and planned for, but will
not be built until sometime after 2020, when the
first phase of construction is completed.
Will the hospital remain open during construction? Absolutely. Of course there will be
construction noise, but every effort will be made
to keep it to a minimum. We will utilize the west
wing while the replacement hospital, or MGH 2.0,
is under construction, then use the new building
while the west wing is being remodeled. As I said,
we expect this first phase to take four years.
Domanico and his staff had
given county residents such
confidence they convincingly
approved a $394 million bond
issue to finance MGH’s
needed improvements and
seismic retrofit.
A garden view is
featured in the new
115-room Marin
General Hospital being
built by LBL Architects.
