New UCSF Mission Bay facility a blueprint for rest of health system

UCSF patients will have access to a brand-new facility Tuesday on the system’s expansive Mission Bay campus, which officials say will make it easier to get primary- and specialty-care appointments.

“There is a tremendous need for access to our primary care and specialists,” said Dr. Inga Lennes, the senior vice president of ambulatory services at UCSF, of the Bayfront Medical Building . Lennes will help manage the 520 Illinois St. building. “In some specialties, it takes more than a month to get in for a vacant appointment.”

Lennes acknowledged to The Examiner during a tour of the facility Friday that there are other factors affecting the level of access patients might have, including health-care worker shortages. She said adding the facility will allow UCSF to onboard six new primary-care physicians, allowing the system to schedule approximately 20,000 new appointments a year.

The new facility, which cost around $228 million, took about three years to build. The funding “was externally financed and will be paid back through our internal capital funds,” a UCSF Health spokesperson told The Examiner on Friday. This essentially means UCSF Health revenue will pay for the building.

Construction at the Parnassus Campus began earlier this year and is projected to end in 2030. Lennes said that opening the new Mission Bay facility will help address some of the project’s parking and access concerns.

“That is a modernization project,” she said. “This helps that, because it provides an addition for some of the services that we have there ... we have so much demand, we can’t service it, and we especially can’t stand there until the construction is finished.”

The new Mission Bay facility includes the resources necessary to handle treatments such as eye surgery and CT scans. The building includes an urgent-care facility, outpatient surgery, primary care, 15 specialty-care areas, outpatient surgery, a same-site lab for bloodwork, a pharmacy for new medications, a physical-therapy gym and radiological-imaging services.

“We don’t get a chance to build a new building like this as often as we’d like to — it’s a lot of work,” Lennes said, pointing out that its construction has given the local health-care giant the opportunity to vet and explore emerging technologies.

One is a new CT scanner incorporating artificial intelligence to improve the accuracy and efficiency of patient scans. Dr. Christopher Hess, the chair of the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering at UCSF, said it provides technicians and patients the best possible image quality.

“This is our only scanner like this ... in an outpatient setting,” Hess said.

David Hwang, the director of eye surgical services at UCSF Health, said the facility allows for robotics-assisted surgery, allowing the system to utilize intensive-care services in “the same-day surgery setting, where patients can recover faster and get home.”

“We’re taking our state-of-the-art aspects — the laboratory discoveries, the robotics, the technology that we used to reserve for being in the hospital, having to go into that big hospital building and staying in the hospital for multiple days,” he said.

Robotics are used to help surgeons be more precise in their operations. Hwang said they are increasingly used in a wide range of procedures, such as prostate and cancer surgeries.

It’s unclear if such innovations will become available at existing facilities already with the UCSF Health system.

“Oftentimes, the infrastructure in our buildings — it’s harder to do that, but anytime we can, we do,” Lennes said.

But similar facilities are in the pipeline, and the Bayfront Medical Building is serving as the blueprint. In October, UCSF is launching same-day ambulatory-surgery services at the Berkeley Outpatient Center in the East Bay. Another outpatient center is opening in Burlingame in February 2025, a UCSF Health spokesperson told The Examiner.

“This is only the first of many outpatient surgery centers that we are opening,” Hwang said of Bayfront. “Our desire is to actually have multiple locations in our entire UCSF Health network.”