Hoag Hospital has begun the public phase of a $627 million fundraising campaign for projects and programs that officials said will touch every aspect of patient care.
Since the “Hoag Promise” campaign quietly began five years ago, the nonprofit Hoag Hospital Foundation has raised $328 million so far, said Flynn Andrizzi, president of the foundation and a senior vice president at the hospital. The goal is to bring in the roughly $300 million balance by 2020.
The campaign is intended to help Hoag, which has hospitals in Newport Beach and Irvine, adapt to changes in healthcare, which include lower reimbursements, as well as a greater emphasis on wellness, technology and personalized medicine.
“The whole business of healthcare is changing,” Andrizzi said. “Philanthropy has become so much more relevant than ever at Hoag.”
The campaign will fund everything from capital improvements to clinical trials. Money will be used to expand community health centers, provide nurse navigators who help patients undergoing complex treatment, nursing scholarships and patient education.
“Hoag needs to continue to invest in the way it delivers healthcare,” said Dick Allen, a hospital board member and one of the lead fundraising volunteers. “This campaign is going to allow us to do this, to be in the wellness business not just the sickness business.”
Andrizzi said he’s excited about personalized medicine using genomic sequencing to determine the best treatment for cancer patients. He said donors will have the chance to give toward programs they most support.
“We’re doing things that insurance doesn’t pay for,” he said. “We need to do that through philanthropy.”
Allen said gone are the days when donors wrote checks for unspecified use without knowing where their dollars went.
“I think philanthropy has changed,” Allen said. “People clearly want to make a difference, they want to have an affect on an area where they’re passionate. It gives people a series of focused opportunities to push that passion forward.”
To learn more, visit the newly launched hoagpromise.org
