With healthy donation, UCSF plans to build new hospital
Boosted by a massive new donation, UC San Francisco has unveiled plans to build a world-class hospital on its Parnassus Heights campus, replacing the aging Moffitt Hospital.
The university last week announced a massive $500 million commitment from the Helen Diller Foundation to support the planning, design and construction of the new hospital, ensuring that UCSF will have an earthquake-resistant structure that can continue to provide top-tier care to patients in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
The $1.5 billion hospital, which is expected to open its doors to patients before 2030, is the centerpiece of the university’s planned revitalization of its Parnassus Heights campus. It will be built on the site currently occupied by the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital and Clinics.
“The current hospital was designed 60 years ago,” said Mark Laret, chief executive of UCSF Medical Center. “Air conditioning was not standard. There was no such thing as electronic medical records. Imaging equipment wasn’t there. We’ve done a good job modifying it, but that’s not like having a new hospital.”
“This will be the ‘next generation’ of hospital,” he said. “We want to make what is often a difficult circumstance and unwelcome time more healing, more normal.”
The gift was pledged by the family foundation of the late Helen Diller, a San Francisco native and longtime champion of UCSF whose husband, Sanford, founded the real estate devel-
opment giant Prometheus Real Estate Group, based in San Mateo. The couple met while both were attending UC Berkeley.
It brings total giving to UCSF by the Diller family to a stunning $1.15 billion or more — and places the family among a handful of American philanthropists who have made commitments of $1 billion or more to a single U.S. academic institution.
“My mother believed in science — and she believed in health care,” said her daughter, Jackie Safier, president of the Helen Diller Foundation board, a member of the UCSF Foundation Board of Overseers and president at Prometheus, in a 2017 interview.
“She asked: ‘What type of institution can have the most impact on global health care in the world, for all of humanity?’” Safier said. “She believed UCSF would have an incredible impact, with the necessary resources.”
The Diller’s Prometheus Real Group built the twin towers at Cupertino City Center and more than 13,000 apartments in the Bay Area, Seattle and Portland, Oregon.
The family foundation’s previously gave $400 million to endowments to support UCSF faculty and students, $100 million for the Chancellor’s Innovation Fund to support new ideas and $35 million to support UCSF’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Woodside residents, Helen Diller died in 2015 and Sanford Diller died on Feb. 2.
Currently, patients on the Parnassus Heights campus are cared for at two landmark structures known as the Moffitt and Long Hospitals, as well as at an Ambulatory Care Center.
Under state law, patient care at Moffitt Hospital must be relocated by 2030 to conform with seismic code requirements. With construction of the new hospital, the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital and Clinics will move to the “Dogpatch” area of San Francisco, near UCSF’s Mission Bay campus, in 2020.
The new hospital will not only incorporate new technologies, such as telemedicine, robotics and intra-operative imaging, but it will be embedded within a research-driven campus that translates discoveries into treatments and cures.
To honor the wishes of the Diller family, UCSF aims to create a hospital environment that uses natural materials, such as wood and plants, to convey a sense of warmth and reassurance, said Laret.
“Hospitals often have big expanses of stone and glass, and they feel important, but they also can feel cold and distance,” he said.
The Diller gift means that construction can start several years earlier than anticipated, said CEO Laret.
“If we can open earlier, there will be tens or hundreds of thousands of people who will benefit from the generosity of this family,” he said.
“The gift is stunning in its size, and the number of lives it touches.”
Contact Lisa M. Krieger at 408-859-5306.