(upbeat music) - Our guest today is Kerry Heinrich.

He is the CEO of Loma Linda University Health Hospitals.

Thank you so much for joining us.

- Pleasure to be here today.

- As an attorney, you started with Loma Linda representing them, and then you would later join the staff in 1984.

You came to us from the northwest region of the country.

What brought you to Loma Linda?

- The thing that brings a lot of people to Loma Linda: education.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, intended to stay there my entire life.

One thing I was certain of, early in my life, is that I would never want to live in California.

Be careful what you say you'll never do.

We moved to California for my wife to attend dental school at Loma Linda University, and she is an active practicing dentist.

- Well, that's what brought you here.

And Loma Linda hospital kept you here.

You are an attorney by trade, right?

- By trade, yes.

- Was Loma Linda one of your clients at the time?

- Yes, I began representing Loma Linda in the 1980s, served as outside counsel, ultimately became, effectively served in the role of general counsel for Loma Linda, and ultimately was asked to serve in my current role as chief executive officer.

- So now I wanna talk a little bit about the older hospital, which you and your colleagues refer to as the cloverleaf building.

It was first built between 1963 and 1967.

Tell me a little bit about that hospital and why maybe it was time for a new hospital.

- The iconic cloverleaf towers, as we refer to them, were built in the 1960s.

My father-in-law was a practicing physician, a surgeon, and he would often say to me, in the context of the cloverleaf towers, Kerry, you don't understand.

In the 1940s and 50s, every hospital, for the most part was a ward hospital.

So your definition of privacy in the 40s and 50s was a curtain if you were lucky and a bedpan on an average day.

And that was a hospital environment in those years.

In the 1960s, when the cloverleaf towers were built, the idea of only two patients to a room and a private bathroom for each room was a quantum leap forward in hospital care.

People don't realize that today, but it was.

But in 2021, the thought of sharing a room with another individual, certainly someone you likely have never met before in your life, when you're sick, when you're struggling, when you're trying to heal, is just not optimal to say the least.

So, one of the drivers, of course, was the ability to ultimately provide private rooms for every single patient, both pediatric patients and adult patients.

But that's not why we built the new hospital.

The driver for the construction of the new adult tower, really is 1994.

Why?

The Northridge earthquake.

1994, following the Northridge earthquake and the effects, seismically, on hospitals across the LA basin, and then of course you had seismic events in San Francisco, the California legislature passed a series of laws that said, if you didn't meet certain seismic standards, the hospital had to be replaced or close your doors.

And it's that simple.

- So, was that the threat of 2019 when the idea came about that you might have to close the doors.

Is that what the threat was?

- Precisely; the timeline for completing that project was December 31, 2019.

Well, building a new hospital is an enormously complex process and I'm not being critical.

It just is.

There's a tremendous amount of regulatory requirements that you have to comply with.

A lot of standards, seismically.

So Loma Linda studied extensively whether we can reconfigure, refurbish, restructure our existing cloverleaf hospital in a way that would allow it to meet seismic standards by 2019.

In the end, we concluded that it just wasn't both practical and cost-effective to do that.

And in the end, you'd still have semi-private rooms.

So, we then launched on a course and fast-tracked it as rapidly as we could to complete the construction of a new adult hospital.

But we just simply couldn't because of a variety of things that came up in the construction and planning and design process, complete it by December 31, 2019.

So, Loma Linda and a number of other hospitals across California went to the legislature and asked for an extension.

And ultimately that extension process, very detailed process, was approved by the legislature.

So, that's the adult hospital.

A very different story for the expansion of our children's hospital.

- I wanna dig into that a little bit deeper.

You refer to one hospital as the adult hospital, and one as the children's hospital or an expansion hospital.

Is that what you mean by the two hospitals?

- That's correct.

We, for some very carefully thought out reasons made the decision to build our adult hospital, and, our new adult hospital, and an expansion of our children's hospital in very close proximity to each other.

And in fact, today you have a common pedestal in our new hospitals and out of that common pedestal rises a 16-story adult tower and a 9-story children's hospital tower.

So why did we choose that configuration?

Well, if you look at adult hospitals and children's hospitals, they obviously have different functions.

But one of the areas where it is particularly critical to have close proximity of adult and children's services in our view is obstetrical services.

Mom comes in for a delivery.

Mom obviously is an adult.

If mom has critical care needs, you need teams of professionals that can deal with an adult patient's challenges, be they cardiac, be they other related issues for mom.

Simultaneously, you need critical care services available for baby.

It is not unusual for a pregnant mom to come into the hospital who has critical health care needs herself as well as critical needs for baby.

So, the ability to have, in one geographic location, teams of experts that can manage mom's needs as an adult and baby's needs as a newborn, is critically important.

So we made a very intentional decision to have in very close proximity, our adult tower and our children's tower, so you could deal with those issues.

It's not just obstetrical services, but that's one of the critical areas that you see that happen.

- What are the challenges that come with building a new hospital along with raising the funds to do it?

- Well, I used to say that healthcare was the most regulated industry outside of nuclear power.

After working my entire career in healthcare, I certainly can't speak to nuclear power, but I can certainly say healthcare is a very, very regulated industry.

And there are good reasons for that.

I'm not being critical of that, but you have federal regulatory requirements.

You have state regulatory requirements.

They don't always perfectly match up, but you must comply with all of them.

And so, building a new hospital is extraordinarily complex, because you must comply with federal requirements, conditions of participation under the federal rules.

And you must comply with state rules, both for licensure and construction under the state rules for construction requirements.

That means that you've got a lot of various federal and state rules that you have to go through and comply with.

In addition to that, Southern California and Northern California, in the Bay area, very complicated regions seismically.

So, although it is very complicated to build a hospital in the Midwest, for instance, you don't have the seismic overlay, and building a hospital, particularly a high rise hospital in California is a very complex proposition.

We chose to go in a very high rise fashion because it brings together in close proximity with rapid access between floors, medical professionals.

If you spread out in a much lower profile building, you have a lot of distance to walk for your healthcare professionals.

And so, healthcare is about being able to respond with the right team of people at the right time, in the right sequence of events.

So, all of those are good reasons, but when you add in the complexity of licensing and the complexity of seismic standards in California, it's a complicated proposition.

- Now I wanna talk a little bit about the funding because it is a huge financial project.

How and where did the funding come from?

We'll talk about your lead contributor in a little bit that are local, but I wanna know about you going to wherever you had to go to get the funding to make this possible for our region.

- Well, I wish I could tell you that when Loma Linda made the decision to construct, really two new hospitals, an adult hospital and an expansion of our children's hospital, that I just sat down and wrote out a check from internal funds of the institution, but all in, this was a $1.5 billion project, and certainly Loma Linda and very few institutions would have the ability to just sit down and write a check.

So, for Loma Linda, the process of putting together the financing of this project was extraordinarily complex.

And I'll describe it for you this way.

In order to make this all work, we had to rely upon four different key funding streams.

First of all, we had to look at the bond community and going to the commercial bond market and raising, in round numbers, about a billion dollars from the commercial bond market.

That is a process that requires you putting together very detailed disclosure documents, and literally starting in New York and then touring around the country with large investment houses.

These are people that manage, for the most part, retirement funds and they buy bonds.

And those bonds have a particular yield attached to them, and investment houses buy those and invest dollars for the benefit of millions of people who have retirement dollars in their 401k or other investment vehicles that they use.

So, an important funding stream for this project was the bond market.

The next critical funding stream for the children's hospital is an equally complex funding stream, but an extraordinarily important one.

And that is the State of California.

In the 1990s, the voters of California generously approved Proposition 61 and four years later, Proposition 3, that earmarked bond funds issued by the State of California backed by the taxpayers of the State of California.

And those dollars were earmarked for children's hospitals.

So for licensed, dedicated children's hospitals, and there are eight separately licensed children's hospitals in the State of California and the children's hospitals connected to the UC schools at Mattel Children's at UCLA and Benioff at UC San Francisco.

So, in route you have 10 children's hospitals dedicated to the children of the State of California.

And Proposition 61 and Proposition 3 earmarked funds for each respective children's hospital, but there's a very complex process you go through to actually draw down those funds.

So essential to Loma Linda was the ability to draw down $165 million of Prop 61 and Proposition 3 dollars, those dollars that are administered and managed by the State of California through an agency called CHFFA: the California Health Facilities Financing Authority.

And that is overseen by the treasurer of the State of California, Fiona Ma.

Wonderful person who was incredibly helpful and instrumental in helping Loma Linda work through that process.

So that was the second important funding stream.

The third important funding stream for Loma Linda was philanthropy.

And we set out a goal of raising, for the entire campus, a series of projects.

Certainly key among those was the new hospital construction project, but a goal of raising $360 million, a very audacious goal.

I will be honest with you.

When we first laid out the plans for this, I thought, how will we ever raise $360 million?

The Inland Empire has incredibly generous people, but it's not the wealthiest region of the nation, nor California.

And I worried about our ability to raise $360 million.

We actually raised that ultimately to $366 million, and we went to work.

But businesses, individuals, patients, loved ones across the Inland Empire opened up in a very big way.

And in fact, not only did we raise $366 million, we actually exceeded $476 million raised for projects, key among them, of course, the new hospitals.

So that was the third funding stream.

And the fourth, obviously, was operations and cash from the hospital organizational structure itself.

- So, when you had to do the bond pitch, what were you telling those financial advisors or investors?

What was your story you were telling about Loma Linda that they would say, yes, we'll take a chance.

Of course, we are a world renowned hospital in our Inland Empire, which we know.

But what was your story?

What were you telling them?

- You literally meet with hundreds of bond investor advisors around the country, and you're exactly right.

You have to tell a story about why and why this is necessary.

How, in fact, you will go through the process of constructing the hospital, its budget.

And ultimately the greatest question will be, what is the need and how will you pay for this?

Well, the Inland Empire is a remarkable place in so, so many ways; it's huge.

Most people don't think about this, but the county of San Bernardino is the largest county in the United States.

The second largest county in the United States by geography is half the size of San Bernardino County.

And that happens to be Riverside County.

So the two largest counties in the United States by geography are San Bernardino County and Riverside County, and Loma Linda serves as an important component part of that delivery system.

Not the only part, but an important part.

It provides level one trauma services for the region.

It provides a variety of very important tertiary quaternary services for patients in the region.

And of course, it is the only children's hospital in the region.

So the story to the bond holders is Loma Linda is an important part of the delivery system for the benefit of the people of the Inland Empire.

It's been here more than 115 years.

It has an established record of performance.

It pioneered infant heart transplantation.

It pioneered a lot of important advancements in medicine, but most importantly, it is a resource for the people of this region.

And it's worthy of believing in the people of this region and the needs of the people of this region to have access to state-of-the-art healthcare.

And in the end, that's a wonderful story to be able to tell to bond holders, because you're really telling the story of the needs of the people of the Inland Empire and the value of bringing a resource to the people of our region that so vitally need that resource.

- Did you have any issues because it is a faith-based hospital?

Did that affect it positively or negatively, or is it just about serving patients in our region?

- Well, Loma Linda has a very distinguished history of serving all patients of all backgrounds, of all faiths, of all needs.

And that is the first commitment Loma Linda has to the people of our region is that we treat all people, regardless.

And one of our core beliefs is the importance of caring for the underserved.

And the Inland Empire is challenged in that regard.

Across the entire region, one out of every three people is a participant in the Medi-Cal program in California, a wonderful program designed by both the federal government and the state government to provide necessary healthcare services to the underserved.

In certain parts of San Bernardino, it's one in two people.

And so Loma Linda has been very committed to that patient base and the needs of that patient base who are underserved in so many ways.

Our faith gives us a focus of wanting to make a difference in the lives of those individuals, but our faith makes it so we're extraordinarily open to treating all patients from all backgrounds, regardless.

So I actually think our faith was a wonderful adjunct to our message because it gives us purpose.

It gives us reason, and it gives us a mission to care for those that are underserved.

- Okay, I wanna jump now to your lead gift of 100 million dollars from Dennis and Carol, is it Troesh?

- Troesh yes.

- Who are they?

- Well, they are remarkable people.

And I use that term very intentionally, because Dennis and Carol Troesh are a quintessential American success story.

Dennis started years ago with a used dump truck and began hauling sand and gravel to various job sites around the Inland Empire.

Dennis is an extraordinarily talented business person and he built a company, and he piece by piece, step by step, literally dump truck load by concrete load, built a company into the largest, I believe the largest, concrete, sand, and gravel company in Southern California, probably the United States.

All of us have driven on the freeways of Southern California and a substantial portion of that concrete you're driving on was, in the end, mixed and delivered by Robertson's Ready Mix, the company that Dennis and Carol owned.

- Got it.

- But the remarkable story of Dennis and Carol is not just the success of building a company from the ground up.

It is that they have a very fundamental belief about supporting the Inland Empire.

And in Dennis's own words, he said, "Many people make their money in the Inland Empire and leave and take their money with them."

Dennis and Carol made a very intentional commitment to give back to the people of the Inland Empire.

And that was the basis for the lead gift of 100 million dollars to Loma Linda for what is now known as the Dennis and Carol Troesh Medical Campus.

- So, I have a couple of questions, and I do wanna ask about the connection, of the 100 year connection, with San Manuel.

And if you'll share the story of the female doctor and over 100 years ago, and the connection that has remained with San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.

- Oh, there are so many amazing stories of people and organizations in the Inland Empire, but certainly an incredibly important part of the history of the Inland Empire is the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.

The history of our country in how it interrelated to and treated Native Americans is not something any of us should be proud of.

The treatment of many of the Native American tribes has been so difficult, and that is true for the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.

Their property, their reservation land.

Remember, they were here first, but we ultimately pushed them up into the foothills of the San Bernardino mountain range.

And there they lived for generations and they lived in extreme poverty.

About 100 years ago, a relationship developed between the San Manuel tribe and Loma Linda.

Lyra George, a female physician.

Very rare if you turn the clock back 80, 90 plus years ago to have a woman licensed as a physician.

She took a special interest in the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, particularly the obstetrical needs of the tribe, the women of the tribe.

And so, every week she would mount up on horseback, ride to the reservation land and she would provide prenatal care, and ultimately at times, obstetrical care on the reservation property.

You turn the clock back forward 100 years, we all know the remarkable success of the San Manuel Band and the amazing work that they have done.

They have now become very successful with their casino activities.

And lots of people want to be friends of the tribe today for lots of good reasons, but the relationship between the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians and Loma Linda goes back a century.

And it started with a commitment of Loma Linda to care for members of the tribe that needed the care.

Not because there was an economic driver to do so, but because it was the right thing to do.

And 100 years later, there is this close partnership between Loma Linda and the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians because that heritage goes back over a century.

- Well, very good.

And assuming they have a donation that was made to the hospital.

Was it to the pediatrics or to the expansion building for the children?

- Well, fittingly, when you understand the history of Dr. George, who rode to the reservation and provided prenatal and obstetrical care, later on with a Model T Ford, over to the reservation, hooking up a set of jumper cables to the battery of the car and using that as a light to provide care well into the night for patients.

Fittingly the $25 million gift made by the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians to Loma Linda was for now the largest unit in our new hospital, that being obstetrical care.

So the new maternity pavilion in the new hospital is the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Maternity Pavilion.

And it's because of the remarkable history between the tribe and Loma Linda.

All because of a commitment to care for those who needed care.

- Now I wanna talk about the construction and if you would please describe this 16-story building that I understand has a lot of steel in it.

- The statistics will change of course over time, but as we sit here today, it is the heaviest building per square foot ever constructed with the exception potentially of military installations.

That, of course, I have no idea because it's classified.

But for commercial buildings and hospital structures, the 16-story adult tower and children's tower sit on a remarkable set of technologies that allow them to do things that is truly quite remarkable.

The pedestal that I have described, and both towers that rise out of that pedestal, sit on a series of seismic devices called pedestals and base isolators on top of those pedestals.

There's 126 pedestals and base isolators on top of that, that allow the building to stay relatively stationary while the ground moves underneath the building.

And in fact, the building can move up to 42 inches in any direction.

So in a seismic anomaly, that building is designed to stay relatively stable, to stay fully functional while you have a major seismic event occurring.

Everybody asks me, so how big an earthquake will it withstand, Kerry?

Well, engineers and probably lawyers are pretty careful not to answer that question.

The answer is it's designed to be fully functional during a 100-year earthquake, meaning an earthquake that would happen once every 100 years.

And it's designed to stay intact during a once every 500 year seismic event.

So, who knows?

Earthquakes are unpredictable.

It's all a question of where the event occurs, how close, how near to the surface, what the sine wave is.

But the building is designed to continue to be functional during a major seismic event.

And to do that required a tremendous amount of steel and a tremendous amount of engineering underneath the building to allow it to do that.

So, what do I mean?

Well, you can actually drive a car underneath the building.

The building sits on pedestals, and you can walk underneath the actual building itself.

So you're standing on a five foot plus thick foundation of concrete.

On that are built pedestals.

On top of that are these devices that allow the building to give during an earthquake.

And then the building sits on top of that.

So, it's the only building I am aware of that you could actually drive under.

- Your move in date was August 8th, or that was the suggested date.

That was your targeted date.

Did it happen?

And how did it go if it did happen?

- We spent two years, more than two years, planning for the move.

A very complicated process as you can well imagine.

We retained a firm to assist us in planning for that move process.

This firm has done the same function for Stanford and for Kaiser hospitals, and other hospitals around California.

So, for more than two years, we planned the event itself.

And all of this, of course, is dependent upon very complex processes that all have to come together.

First, you have to finish the building on your projected timeline.

You have to get the State of California, through its OSHPD department, to sign off on the literally tens of thousands of systems that have to be tested and verified, and then signed off.

You have to have the State of California Licensing and Certification Division go through all one million square feet of that new structure, structures, and sign off that it meets licensure standards.

And then you have to choreograph every patient, every bed, every move, and the pathway of travel.

So we planned all of that to occur on August the 8th, just a little over a month ago.

And in fact, literally thousands of people in our system came together that day to effectuate the safe transfer of patients from the original adult hospital, plus transfer of patients from our children's hospital into the new children's space.

All of it occurred within a roughly six-hour time window with amazing choreography and people who worked so hard to make that happen.

But if you think about it, we had to have a plan for every single patient based upon their diagnosis, the team of medical professionals that would go with that patient, the path of travel, and the team of professionals that would meet that patient when they arrived in the new space.

All of that happened under that amazing set of plans without an adverse event.

And it all went very, very smoothly.

So in answer to your question, yes, we moved on August the 8th.

Yes, we are post that process.

And yes, I'm pleased to tell you that every patient was moved safely.

- Well, kudos to you, your team, and all those there that are serving at Loma Linda.

In doing that, that means if we have private rooms, before we had two in a room.

So can we still serve as many when we went with the private room, 'cause now everyone will have a private room, but before were you able to serve more because you had two in a room?

- So we've been working on this concept for actually 15 plus years.

The actual design of the hospital occurred 10 years ago.

And when you set about to design a new hospital, you bring in the best minds you can find, the experts, and you talk about here's where we are today.

Here our growth projections for the Inland Empire.

There are changes occurring every day, every month, every year in the practice of medicine and how we deliver care.

So, what do our best minds tell us about how big we should build the new hospital?

Hospital beds, construction wise, cost today more than $4 million a bed in construction costs.

So you have to be very thoughtful about what should the right size of the hospital be go forward?

So in our old hospital, you're right.

Semi-private rooms.

In most rooms, two patients.

In some, three patients.

So we had to think about this and the experts said, well, medical care is changing.

There will be fewer inpatient services in the future.

More work done outpatient.

Seems logical.

So you probably, when you take that factor into account, and you take into account the reality that your beds will be more efficient in private room configurations.

What do I mean by that?

Well, in semi-private rooms, when you're sharing a room with someone else, you have to be sensitive to gender issues of all types.

You have to be sensitive to cohorting issues, meaning patients with infectious disease issues, where you can't put another patient in that room even though there would be space.

So when you go to an all private room configuration, all of those cohorting issues theoretically disappear.

So, theoretically, you should need fewer beds.

Problem is how would you predict the growth of the Inland Empire?

And what we now know a decade later is that the size of the hospital, although wonderful, I wish it was substantially larger.

Why?

Because the very first day, it was full.

And that's a challenge now to know how to plan for the future, because our beds are full, the need is present in the Inland Empire, and COVID complicates that reality.

And to some extent, skews that reality of what's the true need for beds in the Inland Empire or California or the country.

But what we know nationwide is we're probably under bedded in most areas of the country and certainly California, in terms of the true need for inpatient services.

So guess what?

That's an issue I'm studying and paying attention to right now with regard to the future.

- So, I was gonna ask you.

Did all this, the team did all this, and you did it under the pandemic, and during a pandemic, How, from a CEO's standpoint of running a hospital, building a new hospital, was that and dealing with the pandemic that we were dealing with here in the Inland Empire and across the country and the world?

- If I were to pick my timeline to construct and open a new hospital, it would not be during a pandemic.

COVID for thousands of reasons, which you would understand, incredibly complicates the delivery of healthcare and the management of healthcare.

So, people don't think about this, but just as COVID affects the delivery of care to patients, it also affects contractors and subcontractors who build buildings.

And so the key portions of the surges that we have been through, and there have been three key surges, those surges of COVID have impacted the builders and how you actually do construction and how you manage your construction workforce.

So that impacted our construction project.

But I'm happy to tell you we were able to bring our construction project in on time on budget.

Having said that, the delivery of care to patients is complex.

There are times within our system that COVID has put us in a position of running 200% occupancy within certain of our hospitals.

Well, think about that.

If you're designed for 100 beds, that's complicated, and hospitals rarely run at 100% occupancy.

They run, most of the time around 80%, because you have bed turnaround issues and cleaning of rooms.

Just like a hotel.

You can't run a hotel at 100% occupancy most of the time because you have turnover issues.

But during the COVID surge, we have at times operated at 200% occupancy.

That means we've put patients everywhere.

It has strained our nursing staff, our respiratory therapy staff, our ICU staff enormously.

And it's not unique to Loma Linda.

Every hospital has suffered under these conditions.

It has strained our oxygen systems.

It strained our ability to just have physical beds.

We don't carry 100% extra beds just lying around.

I mean, the bed that you lay in.

We don't have those empty beds laying around.

So when we're at 100% occupancy, we can accommodate that.

But at 200%, that strains you beyond words in terms of how to deliver that care.

And I'll just sum it up this way.

COVID has strained nurses and respiratory therapists, and physicians in ways they never thought imaginable.

For many, many nurses today, particularly many nurses that were towards the latter years of their career, after the surge that hit us very hard in December and January of this year, there are a substantial number of nurses across the Inland Empire, California, and the nation who said, you know what?

I'm done.

I just can't do this anymore.

When we asked them to work day after day after day, because the demand, the need is there, desperate need to take care of patients, a certain group of nurses legitimately, I'm not being critical, said, I'm just, I'm tired, I'm done.

That has reduced the available workforce in nursing.

And interestingly enough, there's not a small number of nurses at the front end of their careers, after having gone through the surge in December and January and the surge that we're going through right now, who are saying, you know what?

I didn't sign up for this.

I can't do this the rest of my life.

I can't visualize doing this the rest of my life.

So I will tell you, I am incredibly in awe of our physicians, our nurses, our respiratory therapists, the people who clean the rooms, the people who make food.

All of these people, and it's been used a lot, so it sounds a little tired, but they really are heroes.

They have stepped up during a crisis.

- What will happen with the cloverleaf building now?

How will it be used or what will it be used for?

- I've been working on that question for more than five years.

It's a complicated question.

Why?

Because what do you do with a hospital that still has years of life left in it, but it does not meet seismic standards for inpatient care.

It does for outpatient services, for a variety of services.

What is the wisest use of that space?

Well, it would be easy for me to sit down and say, well, I'm gonna put this here and this over there, and this over there.

But it's not that simple because the State of California has to weigh in and say, well, what will we allow you to use that space for?

And that's a complicated question, because do you require the building to be brought up to 2021 building standards?

Do you require the HVAC system, the mechanical systems, the plumbing systems, the electrical system.

Do you require those to be brought up to code because you now have a change of use from inpatient to other care?

I am grateful for state leaders in the OSHPD division who've worked very close with us to try to literally make the rules as we go, because the State of California hasn't been this before.

We're literally making the rules as we go about how you repurpose a hospital building into a building that also can have life left in it, even though it's not designed or does not meet standards for inpatient care.

Well, the answer is we will use it for ambulatory services: outpatient clinics, infusion services, a variety of things, assuming that the final iteration of rules from the State of California allows us to do that.

- Lastly, I wanna end on a positive note, and put you on the spot a little bit here, but what is your favorite part of the 16-story building or the expansion building, 'cause you've seen it all from the ground up, what room, what place is your favorite place?

- Wow, there's a million square feet there.

And that's a hard question to answer because before we opened the new hospitals on August the 8th, as you might guess, I didn't sleep well that night.

I actually didn't sleep at all.

And early, early in the wee hours, just after midnight, on the 8th of August, I literally walked through every single unit and looked at the empty space, and thought about the fact that each of these spaces, for generations to come, will serve the needs of people who are so sick and so in need of healing.

And so, every single space I walked through, whether it's the cardiac unit, the transplant unit, the obstetrical care unit, all of them have a special place in my heart because all of them will render care to people at the most vulnerable times of their lives.

A hospital is unique because, to borrow Disney's term, who I know borrowed it from others, it's the circle of life.

Babies are born in that building and people will breathe their last breath in that building.

It's in so many ways to us sacred space, and our responsibility to care for everyone, with the highest standard of care, to bring medical science to bear, to heal, but also recognize that there are some that will not heal.

And for those, they deserve our best, our finest, our most compassionate care during the last hours of their life.

- Well, very good.

Thank you for that eloquent answer.

Kerry, it's been an absolute pleasure getting to know you, talking with you, and learning more about a hospital here in our Inland Empire community.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

Pleasure to talk with you.

- [Lillian] This program was originally produced for 91.9 KVCR radio (upbeat music)