Jacobs Medical Center is a

teaching hospital A teaching hospital or university hospital is a hospital or medical center that provides medical education and training to future and current health professionals. Teaching hospitals are almost always affiliated with one or more universities a ...

on the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

campus in the

La Jolla La Jolla ( , ) is a hilly, seaside neighborhood in San Diego, California, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean. The population reported in the 2010 census was 46,781. The climate is mild, with an average daily temperature o ...

neighborhood of

San Diego San Diego ( , ) is a city on the Pacific coast of Southern California, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a population of over 1.4 million, it is the List of United States cities by population, eighth-most populous city in t ...

. Along with the

UC San Diego Medical Center, Hillcrest Hillcrest Medical Center at UC San Diego Health (Previously UC San Diego Medical Center, Hillcrest and UC San Diego Medical Center) is one of three medical centers of UC San Diego Health and is a teaching hospital for the University of California, ...

, it serves as a flagship hospital of

UC San Diego Health UC San Diego Health is the academic health system of the University of California, San Diego in San Diego, California. It is the only academic health system serving San Diego and has one of three adult Level I trauma centers in the region. In o ...

and the primary teaching hospital for the

UC San Diego School of Medicine The University of California, San Diego School of Medicine is the graduate medical school of the University of California, San Diego, a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in La Jolla, California. It wa ...

. The facility, which offers specialized care not previously available in

San Diego County San Diego County (), officially the County of San Diego, is a county in the southwest corner of the U.S. state of California, north to its border with Mexico. As of the 2020 census, the population was 3,298,634; it is the second-most populous ...

, opened in 2016. Jacobs Medical Center comprises three specialty pavilions. The A. Vassiliadis Family Pavilion for Advanced Surgery occupies floors two and three. Floors four through six are reserved for the Pauline and Stanley Foster Pavilion for Cancer Care, and the eighth through tenth floors are occupied by the Rady Pavilion for Women and Infants. Jacobs Medical Center and the existing Thornton Pavilion share a first, second and third floor and are connected to Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center, the Perlman Medical Offices, and the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute building via footbridges.

Planning and construction

In 2005, the

announced plans to shift all its operations at its aging Hillcrest hospital to a new facility in

, adjacent to Thornton Hospital on the eastern half of its main campus. This announcement was met with heavy pushback from lawmakers, rival medical providers, and patient advocates who argued that the move would leave South Bay communities underserved and other local hospitals overwhelmed. On May 18, 2007, the UC Regents approved a plan to build an additional 125 to 150-bed inpatient tower in La Jolla. The approval was paired with a UC San Diego commitment to continue providing care in Hillcrest beyond the year 2030. The university broke ground on the new inpatient tower on April 9, 2012. At the time, the hospital was expected to cost $664 million and had been named Jacobs Medical Center in honor of Irwin and Joan Jacobs donating $75 million toward its construction (they would go on to donate another $25 million). Over the next few years, construction costs continued to grow as health system officials decided to add a specialized surgical suite, operating rooms, an anatomic pathology lab, a cardiac rehabilitation program, a discharge pharmacy, and nursing administrative space. Additionally, it was determined that multiple floors which were originally planned as empty space would open with the rest of the hospital. The finished 509,500 sq ft, 245-bed tower cost more than $940 million and opened in November 2016.

CannonDesign CannonDesign is a global architecture, engineering and consulting practice that provides services for a range of project types, including hospitals and medical centers, corporate headquarters and commercial property, commercial office buildings, ...

was the architect, Kitchell Contractors, Inc. was the general contractor.

Pavilions

Thornton Pavilion

Thornton Hospital opened in 1993 as a standalone general medical-surgical hospital with 119 beds and a full range of specialties. The construction of Jacobs Medical Center was originally intended as a simple expansion of the hospital, but evolved into the ten-story quaternary care facility that exists today. In 2016, the hospital was consolidated into the Jacobs Medical Center complex as its own pavilion. It shares a first, second and third floor with the new inpatient tower and a first and second floor with the Perlman Medical Offices outpatient clinic, and continues to offer services such as surgery and radiology.

Vassiliadis Pavilion

The A. Vassiliadis Pavilion for Advanced Surgery has 14 operating rooms of 650 sq ft each. It occupies the second and third floors of the medical center and is named for Carol Vassiliadis' $8.5 million gift on behalf of her deceased husband Alkiviadis. The pavilion is staffed by 200 surgeons and provides technology to perform surgeries not possible elsewhere in the county. These include minimally invasive surgeries to treat cancer and

obesity Obesity is a medical condition, considered by multiple organizations to be a disease, in which excess Adipose tissue, body fat has accumulated to such an extent that it can potentially have negative effects on health. People are classifi ...

; microsurgeries to restore voice, hearing, and facial function;

MRI Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to generate pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes inside the body. MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields, magnetic field gradients, and rad ...

-guided gene therapy for brain cancer; heated

intraperitoneal The peritoneum is the serous membrane forming the lining of the abdominal cavity or coelom in amniotes and some invertebrates, such as annelids. It covers most of the intra-abdominal (or coelomic) organs, and is composed of a layer of mesothe ...

chemotherapy for abdominal cancer; spine and joint reconstruction; and

robotic surgery Robot-assisted surgery or robotic surgery are any types of surgical procedures that are performed using robotic systems. Robotically assisted surgery was developed to try to overcome the limitations of pre-existing minimally-invasive surgical ...

for several cancers. The technologies at work include the region's only four intraoperative

machines, which allow real-time imaging of tumors and gene therapies during surgery to ensure complete treatment, as well as the nation's only Restriction Spectrum Imaging technology, which color code brain fibers to better plan for complex surgeries in advance. The area also includes three Intensive Care Units with 36 private rooms.

Foster Pavilion

The Pauline and Stanley Foster Pavilion for Cancer Care is a 108-bed facility affiliated with

Moores Cancer Center The Rebecca and John Moores Cancer Center is the region's only NCI-designated Cancer Center, part of UC San Diego Health and affiliated with the University of California, San Diego. It is supported, in part, by the National Cancer Institute T ...

and dedicated to the treatment of advanced

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving Cell growth#Disorders, abnormal cell growth with the potential to Invasion (cancer), invade or Metastasis, spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Po ...

s. It is the only dedicated inpatient cancer hospital in San Diego. The pavilion occupies the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors of Jacobs Medical Center and is named for a $7.5 million gift from Pauline Foster. Patients will have access to over 100 cancer subspecialists working at Moores Cancer Center. The sixth floor of the hospital, jointly operated with

Sharp HealthCare Sharp HealthCare is a not-for-profit regional health care group based in San Diego, California. Sharp includes four acute care hospitals, three specialty hospitals, and three affiliated medical groups. It has approximately 2,700 affiliated physi ...

, is the only open floor in California with full-unit air filtration, allowing blood and marrow transplant patients and those undergoing

chemotherapy Chemotherapy (often abbreviated chemo, sometimes CTX and CTx) is the type of cancer treatment that uses one or more anti-cancer drugs (list of chemotherapeutic agents, chemotherapeutic agents or alkylating agents) in a standard chemotherapy re ...

to socialize and roam throughout the floor. Procedures such as laser ablation of brain tumors are handled downstairs in the Vassiliadis Pavilion.

Rady Pavilion

The Rady Pavilion for Women and Infants includes eight labor rooms, 32 postpartum rooms, three operating suites for

cesarean section Caesarean section, also known as C-section, cesarean, or caesarean delivery, is the surgical procedure by which one or more babies are delivered through an incision in the mother's abdomen. It is often performed because vaginal delivery would ...

s and a three-room midwife center. It occupies the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the hospital and is named for a $12 million gift from Evelyn and Ernest Rady, whose names are also on the UC San Diego School of Management and San Diego's

Children's Hospital A children's hospital (CH) is a hospital that offers its services exclusively to infants, children, adolescents, and young adults from birth up to until age 18, and through age 21 and older in the United States. In certain special cases, the ...

. The pavilion includes a Level III

Neonatal Intensive Care Unit A neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), also known as an intensive care nursery (ICN), is an intensive care unit (ICU) specializing in the care of ill or premature newborn infants. The NICU is divided into several areas, including a critical c ...

to monitor and care for severely premature or ill infants. Pregnant women and new mothers also have access to non-invasive fetal

genetic testing Genetic testing, also known as DNA testing, is used to identify changes in DNA sequence or chromosome structure. Genetic testing can also include measuring the results of genetic changes, such as RNA analysis as an output of gene expression, or ...

, wireless fetal heart rate monitoring during labor, fertility preservation, and

preeclampsia Pre-eclampsia is a multi-system disorder specific to pregnancy, characterized by the new onset of high blood pressure and often a significant amount of protein in the urine or by the new onset of high blood pressure along with significant end- ...

detection and treatment. The hospital has views of UC San Diego, the Torrey Pines Mesa, La Jolla and the Pacific Ocean.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jacobs Medical Center Teaching hospitals in California UC San Diego Health Hospital buildings completed in 2016 Hospitals in San Diego