New hospital continues long history of value-focused care

Nearly nine decades ago, Stanford teamed with the City of Palo Alto to build a hospital for the growing community on the peninsula.

The original Palo Alto Hospital — the building we now call the Hoover Pavilion — served as the major health care provider in the area until 1959, when the current Stanford Hospital opened its doors. The original Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital followed in 1991. Then, just two years ago, we completed a 521,000-square-foot expansion of our pediatric and obstetric hospital, specially designed to provide the latest medical technology in an environment of holistic healing. 

Now, as we put the finishing touches on the new Stanford Hospital, we’re honored to begin the next chapter in our long history of collaborating with the community to provide value-focused care for people living on the peninsula and beyond.

Over the summer, we received important confirmation of our quality, service and standards.

The American College of Surgeons reverified Stanford Health Care and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford as a Level I adult and pediatric trauma center in June. We are proud to be one of just five centers in the state of California — and the only center on the peninsula — to hold the highest possible verification for trauma care.

High standards

Stanford Health Care also completed a rigorous review through the Joint Commission’s triennial accreditation survey. This on-site assessment occurs once every three years, and the renewal of our accreditation certifies that we meet or exceed meticulous patient safety and quality standards from one of the nation’s most respected evaluating organizations.

We celebrate our physicians, nurses, administrators and other staff members for their continued hard work to maintain these levels of excellence.

But we have no plans to rest on our laurels.

In more than a decade of careful planning, we’ve endeavored to create a new hospital and network of care that embody our mission for the future while raising the bar on our accomplishments. We plan to continue offering a world-class patient experience and delivering on our vision of precision health, which aims to prevent disease before it strikes, all while emphasizing the highest-quality care and service.

The new adult hospital supports the latest technological and scientific innovations while accommodating the medical advances of the future. Standing seven stories tall and encompassing 824,000 square feet, the design is tailored to provide the ideal setting for delivering superior care with ease, safety and precision. We’ve added 368 private patient rooms — bringing the total to 600 on site. We’ve expanded emergency services, and we’ve built state-of-the-art operating suites that include 20 operating rooms that fill more than 3 acres of surgical floor space.

We also understand that patient experience and value go hand in hand, so we focused on comfort, digital connection and personalized care in this new facility. All patient rooms are private, with added space for family members, a 55-inch television screen, and easy digital access to online resources, as well as communication and education from care teams. Four acres of gardens — including interconnected rooftop terraces — offer solace for the soul.

Expanded services

In addition to investing in our new hospital, we’ve worked hard to develop a vibrant regional network to serve patients of all ages close to their homes. Across the nation, more and more patient visits are taking place in an outpatient, non-acute setting. In response, we at Stanford Medicine — which includes Stanford Health Care, Stanford Children’s Health and the School of Medicine — have bolstered our clinical network presence to include more than 100 practice locations for adult, obstetric and pediatric care around the Bay Area. We’ve also refined our telemedicine offerings, providing patients with immediate, convenient, remote access to our expert clinicians.

Caring for our neighbors

And our dedication to the community goes beyond our devotion to the highest-caliber clinical care. In 2018 alone, Stanford Health Care invested more than $378 million and Stanford Children’s Health invested more than $244 million in services and activities to improve the health of our neighbors through charity care, health education, community health improvement programs and more. For example, through our public health campaign Stop the Bleed, members of our trauma services team teach local community members how to control life-threatening bleeding to save lives. Our Stanford Health Library also provides free scientifically based medical information to help people make informed decisions about their health and health care.

Driven by rigorous standards, empathy and compassion, and guided by feedback from our patients, families and other members of the community, we’ve spent years focusing on countless details because we know that even the smallest touches can make a meaningful difference to our patients.

Though much has changed since the Hoover Pavilion’s early days as the original Palo Alto Hospital, Stanford Medicine’s commitment to providing the highest-value health care for our community keeps going strong.