Donation a boon for Hilo hospital
HILO, Hawai‘i —A $50 million investment in Hilo Medical Center by Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, will be used to launch a family birthing center and help the hospital complete its expansion of the intensive care unit.
Hilo Medical Center (HMC) CEO Dan Brinkman said Monday the ICU price tag is about $80 million, with $20 million of the Benioffs’ gift augmenting $50 million recently appropriated by the state, along with $10 million HMC has reserved of its own funds. The project will increase HMC’s ICU beds from 11 to 19 and the medical and surgical unit from 15 beds to 36.
“So, it’s kind of a public-private partnership,” Brinkman said. “And that still leaves money from the Benioffs’ $50 million, so $15 million of that is going towards the family birthing center, which will be within the main hospital. And there’s money remaining for neurosurgical and physician recruiting initiatives.
“I don’t want to get into the particulars of it, but most of the monies are tied into project milestones. As we move along and make progress, the money is committed to keep the projects moving along.”
Brinkman said the contractor for the ICU expansion, Nan Inc., already is on-site, with groundbreaking set for April.
The $50 million from the Benioffs, plus $100 million to Hawai‘i Pacific Health, parent company of Straub Medical Center in Honolulu, will help connect both facilities to UCSF Health in San Francisco — another recipient of the Benioffs’ largesse — and increase the Hawai‘i hospitals’ ability to connect patients to more specialized medical care.
“We basically identified within the agreement areas that are challenging for us,” Brinkman said. “Neurosurgical services — we don’t have them on the island, obviously. If you have a head trauma, you really have a short window to have something done to intervene. And often, it’s not soon enough to get you to O‘ahu. So, we want to develop services here that … can stabilize a head injury enough to get you to O‘ahu in time so you don’t have a bad outcome.”
The agreement calls for renaming the hospital the Hilo Benioff Medical Center and Straub to Straub Benioff Medical Center, in recognition of the Benioffs’ philanthropy of more than $250 million in Hawai‘i and health care donations nationwide of more than $600 million.
The Big Island’s physician shortage is well documented, and Brinkman said HMC will piggyback on HPH’s “bandwidth” to help recruit physicians.
“We’ve done some of this already with Hawai‘i Pacific Health with obstetrics,” he said. “And what this agreement does for both hospitals is that we’ve committed to collaborate together to recruit physicians for the hard-to-fill services here on the island.
“To bring in a coveted specialist who has a lot of choices takes a lot of preparation, and often, you need a partner to help you with it.”
Brinkman said despite the upcoming name changes and the public-private partnership, Hilo Benioff Medical Center won’t be a privatized entity.
“We’re not in talks to become part of HPH. None of that is on the table,” he said. “We just happen to have the same donor who gave to two different hospitals and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you guys work a little tighter together.’”
While the ICU project is shovel-ready, the family birthing center and neurosurgical program “have yet to be developed,” according to Brinkman.
“We are in the design stage for the family birthing center,” he said. “The neurosurgical program, we’ve put together a program, basically, kind of a pathway, but we still have yet to develop it. So, most of the Benioff money and the benefits from it will be realized over the next three to five years, because it takes time to implement these types of services and make these kind of improvements.”
The Benioffs have contributed to more than 70 organizations in Hawai‘i over the past two decades-plus.
A short list of their philanthropic work on the Big Island includes 282 acres plus a $7.5 million cash gift to Hawai‘i Island Community Development Corp. for affordable housing, plus a dozen fire trucks and matched funding for two state-of-the-art helicopters through the Sayre Foundation.
“It’s amazing when people with that amount of resource lines it up with our mission,” Brinkman said. “Because if you want to impact every person who lives on this island, give to health care. I think they picked well, and we intend to use that gift wisely.”
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Reporter John Burnett can be reached at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.