Plans for southwest Santa Rosa Kaiser campus move ahead

Aug. 01--Kaiser Permanente is moving forward with plans to build a new 75,000-square-foot medical office building in southwest Santa Rosa, a move partly aimed at serving the area's growing young Latino population as well as the broader population of the west county.

Kaiser recently purchased 10.85 acres of property in the Northpoint Corporate Center off Sebastopol Road. Kaiser intends to develop 6.2 acres of the property, constructing a three-story facility that will offer primarily family medical services. The remaining acres will stay undeveloped for now, Kaiser officials said.

The medical office building will occupy the northwest corner of the property, which is made up of four parcels, at Mercury Way and Corporate Center Parkway. The entrance to the building will be on Mercury Way.

The exterior features of the project have been given preliminary approval by the Santa Rosa Design and Review Board, and Kaiser soon will begin work on finalizing the structure's sizing and budget before beginning work on the building's interior architectural, engineering and mechanical plans. No timeline has been set for that work, said Ed Walera, manager of the capital projects team in Kaiser's Marin and Sonoma counties service area.

"What you see now is what it's going to look like, period," Walera said, referring to artist renderings of the building's exterior design.

Guy Chicoine, medical group administrator for Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center, said the new medical building will allow the health care giant to "decompress our current main campus" on Bicentennial Way. Chicoine said that Kaiser has been growing rapidly, especially with the recent full implementation of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act.

The Northpoint Corporate Center site allows Kaiser to better serve its "good base" of members in southwest Santa Rosa, Chicoine said. "Most of Kaiser's members are around the main campus, but the second-largest population of Kaiser members live in the southwest," he said.

The Northpoint project comes at a time when Palm Drive Hospital officials are searching for a way to bring some medical services back to the west county following the recent closure of Palm Drive Hospital.

Daymon Doss, executive director of Palm Drive Hospital, said Kaiser already has captured a significant share of the health insurance market in Sebastopol and the west county.

Kaiser officials said this week that for the past six years they have been honing a model program for serving Santa Rosa's growing Latino population. Latinos comprise more than a quarter of Santa Rosa residents, according to U.S. Census estimates.

In the west building of Kaiser's main campus, Latino members can receive health care services in their own language at Salud en Español, a clinic in which doctors and staff all are bilingual. The clinic, part of Kaiser's La Salud Permanente initiative, started with three to four doctors but now has nine, said Laura Tinti, assistant medical group administrator at the Kaiser's Santa Rosa Medical Center.

Bicultural and bilingual health care services will be just one aspect of the Northpoint medical office building, Kaiser officials said. Like the Salud en Español, the new campus will be open to any members who want to go there.

"Does it hurt us? We're closed," Palm Drive's Doss said. "Does it make it perhaps more difficult to reopen? That's possible."

The majority of the new building will be family medicine services, including pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology. However, Kaiser does plan on moving its current dermatology and foot and ankle surgery to the new site. Like all of its other satellite locations, the new building also will have lab, imaging and pharmacy services, Tinti said.

The building will house 35 to 45 physicians and another 100 to 150 medical staff. It also will host an estimated 20,000 medical visits a month and be the health care home to 40,000 to 60,000 Kaiser members.

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