Silicon Valley health care provider plans two medical campuses

One of Northern California's largest health care providers has plans to build two medical campuses, as patient overflow is straining Silicon Valley emergency rooms with long wait times and life-threatening delays.

Sutter Health is investing $800 million to renovate two large, vacant offices in Santa Clara into non-hospital, outpatient rooms for a range of medical services across 1 million square feet. The facilities will be less than a mile away from each other just off Great America Parkway. Services are expected to include primary and specialty care, imaging, lab and diagnostic services, ambulatory surgery and more.

Company officials told San Jose Spotlight they're taking a staged approach to opening the two campuses. Santa Clara officials say they issued two permits for Sutter Health in November 2024.

"It will go through all the appropriate approvals to ensure we're complying," Kevin Cook, Sutter Health's Silicon Valley division president, told San Jose Spotlight.

Services will start rolling out as early as late 2025, with the aim to have everything operational by 2031 at the latest. The company plans to hire 200 to 300 physicians and advanced practice clinicians every year until 2030.

Sutter Health already operates in Santa Clara County as one of the largest providers of medical services on an outpatient basis, without admission to a hospital or other facility. Existing locations include facilities in San Jose, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Los Gatos and Mountain View. Its footprint also extends through multiple Bay Area counties.

Dr. Kurt Vanderhort is an internal medicine physician and CEO of the Palo Alto Foundation Medical Group, which manages Sutter Health's physician network. He said the expansion tackles a growing need for access to care in an outpatient setting and is also convenient for patients.

"Things like total joint replacements - when I started 29 years ago, they were all done in a hospital and you'd have to stay four days," he told San Jose Spotlight. "Now you can do it in our ambulatory surgery center in Mountain View and people are discharged to a home with extensive home care services where we watch them very closely. They're getting care from their loved ones, they're in their own bed and their risk of hospital infection and other things that could happen in a hospital are much lower."

Great America Parkway will divide both campuses. The 300,000-square-foot east campus will focus on primary care, with an ambulatory surgery center and urgent care. It will also include specialty clinics for cardiology, neurology, urology and other procedural specialties and offer advanced diagnostic lab and imaging, primary and specialty pediatric care and pediatric urgent care.

The 700,000-square-foot west campus will focus on specialty services around orthopedics and sports medicine, cancer, women's health and heart and vascular care. The campus will also house comprehensive diagnostic imaging, lab and testing services and other specialty clinics.

The east campus' primary care building aims to come online between late 2025 and early 2026, Cook said. The goal is also to get the ambulatory surgery center and some west campus services open in 2027.

"The reason we're making such a large investment is to ensure that the folks that reside in Silicon Valley and want to come see us have enough space, and to add all the physicians we're adding," Cook said. "We want every patient to feel as if they're the only patient."

Vanderhort said the two campuses need to be near each other.

"Sometimes we have physicians move back and forth depending on what services they're providing. We know from a patient standpoint, it's easy if they needed an imaging study in one site they could move back and forth between laboratories," Vanderhort said. "Also our ambulatory surgery center and our urgent care -- it's nice to have those proximate to each other."

Sutter's plans come as Santa Clara County's hospital system is also growing, with the county buying Regional Medical Center in East San Jose earlier this year, after private hospital corporation HCA Healthcare cut trauma, heart attack and stroke care. County doctors warned the loss of services would have a "dystopian" strain on the next closest public hospital, Valley Medical Center. It's the county's fourth hospital purchase since 2019, when it acquired O'Connor and St. Louise Regional hospitals and De Paul Health Center in Morgan Hill that were on the verge of closing -- and the latest effort to save financially struggling hospitals from shuttering or cutting services and turning swaths of Silicon Valley into health deserts.

"The proposed expansion exemplifies the demand for additional health care services in our community and newly announced service lines from all providers will have a positive impact for residents in Santa Clara County and the Bay Area," Santa Clara Valley Healthcare spokesperson Roger Ross told San Jose Spotlight. "This is why Santa Clara Valley Healthcare continues to expand its health care network, including opening VHC Morgan Hill and VHC North County in 2024."

Editor's note: This story originally appeared on San Jose Spotlight.