City of Hope aims to ‘reestablish the standard of care’

As City of Hope prepares to open its new hospital in Orange County, California next week, Dr. Ed Kim says he’s excited about the possibilities.

Kim is the physician-in-chief of City of Hope Orange County. The new cancer specialty hospital will open Dec. 1. It will be connected to the City of Hope Orange County Lennar Foundation Cancer Center in Irvine.

He says he’s looking forward to ensuring patients can get cutting-edge care.

“We want to help them not only survive, but also thrive,” Kim tells Chief Healthcare Executive®.

City of Hope’s new hospital employs more than 700 people, including an additional 50 physicians hired for the hospital.

“We're really ready to deliver that commitment that we made to the people who desperately need it in our county,” Kim says.

(See part of our conversation in this video. The story continues below.)

Setting a new bar

With the hospital being built alongside City of Hope’s outpatient complex in Orange County, patients will have easier access to the services they need, Kim says.

It should also help patients get services faster. If a patient has been examined and a doctor finds an abnormality that could be cancer, the patient may need to see a radiation oncologist and a medical oncologist, a process that can last for weeks.

But Kim says that journey can be finished in less than a week on the Orange County campus.

“Underneath our single roof at City of Hope Orange County, we literally have more cancer expertise in physicians and scientists and nurses than any other organization in the region, and that's because we're just all cancer,” he says.

A shorter timetable can reduce stress on a patient during a traumatic time, when patients are wondering if they have cancer and what it means for their future.

“That time period is so critical and can add so much stress to a patient, so much anxiety, and this is what we try to alleviate,” Kim says. “We try to shorten that period of time to get to an answer so we can get to the solution quicker.”

City of Hope is engaged in over 700 cancer-focused clinical trials, and Kim says that focus on research is critical in giving patients more opportunities for patients to have a better life.

Kim is restless to expand those possibilities in treating patients.

“When you hear somebody practicing or receiving the standard of care, the standard of care is not good enough,” he says.

“The standard of care is what we got approved yesterday and the day before and a year ago,” Kim continues. “It is our job, especially being very deep knowledge experts in the field, to continually push ourselves to reestablish the standard of care. And that new bar that we set is now the baseline bar that we have to continue to build on, and we will continue to do that. That’s our mission at City of Hope, at other cancer centers, because that occurs until we cure cancer, and we don't have any business.”

Kim also serves as the system director of City of Hope’s National Clinical Trials Network. He says the system can deploy clinical trials in Orange County, across all of the system’s sites in California and at City of Hope’s cancer centers in Chicago, Atlanta and Phoenix. Those trials can be led by a single investigator under a single budget.

He says that City of Hope in Orange County helped establish the blueprint for a comprehensive and unified system.

“We really are a single system, and that has helped everything across our national network, to have this oneness among City of Hope,” Kim says.

‘Thankfulness and gratitude’

City of Hope opened its outpatient center in Orange County in 2022, and Kim says that the demand for services “has been off the charts.”

Now Kim is looking forward to the opening of the hospital and the chance to provide acute care services, and he thinks the community will appreciate the new facility.

“I will feel a very high sense of thankfulness and gratitude,” he says. “I think every person that we see walking through that door, whether they're an employee and more importantly, if they're a patient or a volunteer, I think they're going to be thankful that this now exists, this type of high performance, high acuity, high expertise center, one of the top cancer centers in the country, is in their backyard.

And he adds, “I think our doctors are going to be thankful that they have a new place to see more patients.”

With more people being diagnosed with cancer at younger ages, Kim says there’s a growing need for the services of the new hospital. The American Cancer Society says more Americans are developing cancer under the age of 50, including more women developing breast cancer at younger ages.

“There are just too many cancer cases out there. We're seeing them in younger and younger people. That is very concerning,” Kim says.

Kim says City of Hope is aiming to develop more screening programs to detect cancers in younger people, and catch them at earlier stages.

City of Hope can draw top scientists because of its focus on cancer, and health system leaders expect the new hospital can help attract more top talent.

But Kim says recruiting will always be a top challenge.

“I really want the best of the best,” Kim says.

Kim says he’s looking beyond the experience of physicians or how many journal articles they published. Kim, who interviewed every physician at the new hospital, says there is one last criteria they must meet.

As Kim says, “I have to be able to send my mother to them.”