UC San Diego Health | HealthLuminate

Health System Overview

Health System	UC San Diego Health
Total Hospitals	3
Commercial/Acute Hospitals	3
Total Beds	1034
Commercial/Acute Beds	1034
Headquarters	San Diego, CA
Website	health.ucsd.edu

Hospitals by Type

Acute Care Hospital

3 hospitals

100% of health system

Teaching Status

33%

Teaching

Teaching Hospitals: 1

Non-Teaching Hospitals: 2

Teaching hospitals serve as educational institutions for medical professionals while providing patient care.

Hospital Locations

Hospitals in this Health System

Hospital	Type	Beds	Teaching	Recently Joined
UC San Diego Medical Center, Hillcrest	Acute Care Hospital	600	Yes	No
El Centro Regional Medical Center	Acute Care Hospital	153	No	No
UC San Diego Health East Campus Medical Center	Acute Care Hospital	281	No	Yes

Recent News

Jun 16, 2025

The Imperial Valley Healthcare District Board of Directors has unanimously approved a five-year agreement with UC San Diego Health, a nationally recognized hospital system. This strategic partnership aims to significantly enhance healthcare access and quality for residents of Imperial Valley. The collaboration is structured in two phases, focusing on integrating IVHD's facilities, including Pioneers Memorial Hospital and El Centro Regional Medical Center, under unified management. The goal is to achieve sole community hospital status and optimize operational efficiencies. This agreement is expected to increase access to specialized healthcare for Imperial County residents, improve healthcare access for vulnerable populations served by the district facilities, and enhance operational stability through better expense management, physician recruitment and retention, and workforce development. The partnership is pending approval from the Office of Health Care Affordability (OHCA) and is set to begin on July 1, with UC San Diego Health initially providing strategic advisory services during the integration phase, followed by comprehensive management services through July 2030. [4]

Jun 10, 2025

Olympus Corporation announced the full market release of its AI-driven emphysema screening program, SeleCT™ Screening. This program utilizes an AI platform, powered by 4DMedical, to automatically review existing chest computed tomography (CT) scans within a health system to identify patients who may have severe emphysema and could benefit from bronchoscopic lung volume reduction (BLVR) with endobronchial valves. Dr. Niral Patel, an interventional pulmonologist with UC San Diego Health, commented on the program, stating that this use of AI technology presents an exciting opportunity to help more emphysema patients in the communities they serve. He emphasized the critical need to identify the right patients for the right treatment faster, as the traditional process takes time which many severe emphysema patients do not have. Physicians are notified if a potentially qualified patient is identified, allowing them to be contacted for further evaluation for the Spiration™ Valve System. Emphysema is a progressive form of COPD characterized by loss of elasticity and enlargement of lung air sacs, leading to difficulty breathing.

Jun 10, 2025

A manuscript titled “Answering real-world clinical questions using large language model, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic systems” was published in Digital Health. The authors affiliations include Atropos Health, Stanford University, The Hospital for Sick Children, Columbia University, University of Michigan, and the University of California, San Diego. The study explored the use of large language models (LLMs) to address the challenges in practicing evidence-based medicine when relevant data is scarce or difficult to contextualize for individual patients. The researchers submitted 50 clinical questions to five different LLM-based systems, including OpenEvidence (using retrieval-augmented generation), ChatRWD (using an LLM as an interface to a data extraction and analysis pipeline), and three general-purpose LLMs (ChatGPT-4, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro). Nine independent physicians evaluated the responses for relevance, quality of supporting evidence, and actionability. Key conclusions indicated that general-purpose LLMs rarely provided relevant, evidence-based answers, while the retrieval-augmented generation-based LLM performed well when existing data was available. Only the agentic ChatRWD was capable of providing actionable answers when pre-existing studies were lacking, suggesting that synergistic systems combining RAG-based evidence summarization and agentic generation of novel evidence could enhance the availability of pertinent evidence for patient care.

Jun 09, 2025

Jacobs Medical Center and Hillcrest Medical Center at UC San Diego Health have been recognized as Top 25 hospitals nationally for their significant sustainability efforts. [5, 22] This award highlights the health system's commitment to environmental responsibility in its operations.

Jun 05, 2025

UC San Diego Health, as part of the larger UC Health System, is currently engaged in contract negotiations with Blue Shield of California. Select contracts between the UC Health System and Blue Shield are set to expire on July 9, 2025. These negotiations could potentially affect CalPERS members who are insured by certain Blue Shield of California plans, including PERS Platinum PPO, PERS Gold PPO, Blue Shield Access+ HMO and EPO, and Trio HMO, and receive their care through UC Health facilities. Blue Shield of California has begun notifying potentially impacted HMO members via mail about the possibility of contract terminations if a new agreement is not reached. PPO members are expected to receive letters at a later date. If a contract termination were to occur, it would not be considered a qualifying event for members to change their health plans outside of the regular Open Enrollment period.

Executive Leadership

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