Sutter Health announces $1 billion expansion plan for East Bay
The project is designed to bring medical care within a 15-minute drive for most East Bay residents. However, there have been renewed concerns about healthcare access in West Contra Costa County, particularly in Richmond, where currently there is only one emergency department for a city of 112,000.
Sutter East Bay Medical Group has announced a $1 billion project to expand its services across the East Bay. The project includes constructing a flagship medical campus in Emeryville, which will include a 200-bed hospital and a regional ambulatory care complex.
The new campus, planned for a 12-acre site on Horton and 53rd Street, will incorporate two existing buildings for outpatient care and a newly built acute care hospital, which will open between 2032 and 2033. It will replace acute care services currently provided at Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley.
The project is designed to bring medical care within a 15-minute drive for most East Bay residents. However, there have been renewed concerns about healthcare access in West Contra Costa County, particularly in Richmond, where currently there is only one emergency department for a city of 112,000.
Richmond residents once had three nearby hospitals: Richmond Hospital on 23rd Street, Brookside Hospital in San Pablo, and Kaiser Permanente. The closure of Richmond Hospital and Brookside, which became Doctors Medical Center in its waning days, left only Kaiser Permanente. As a result, many patients have to travel to Oakland, Vallejo, or Walnut Creek to seek emergency and specialty care.
Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia said Sutter’s decision to build in Emeryville will benefit West County residents by reducing both ambulance drive times to emergency rooms and overall response times.
“It doesn’t replace the need for a hospital, but it provides some benefits for getting to an emergency room faster,” Gioia said.
Gioia said the initial plan to close Alta Bates involved expanding Sutter’s Oakland hospital. This plan faced significant opposition, with some arguing that it would result in longer transport times from West County to downtown Oakland for emergency services.
“Sutter made a very calculated decision to stay in that same market to serve the same people in a more convenient location that had room for expansion,” Gioia said. “If you live in Richmond, you might think it takes me 15 minutes to get to Bay Street for a movie; I can get there in the same amount of time.”
Why no New Hospital for West County?
Gioia emphasized the financial challenges of maintaining standalone hospitals in today’s healthcare landscape, with the county working to identify a major healthcare system willing to invest the billion dollars it would take to build a new hospital in West County.
“The only way West County gets a hospital is for a large system like UCSF or John Muir, which are in the area, to come in and help, and neither of them are prepared to invest a billion dollars, especially with the low Medi-Cal reimbursement rates, which may get even lower.”
The current healthcare market is causing many hospital district hospitals around the state to close. Gioia attributes this to the fact that standalone hospitals are not able to survive. “Hospitals have to be part of an integrated healthcare system, like primary care, specialty care, to survive,” he said.
“I met recently with the leadership of John Muir, and they’ve said we would only consider expansion after we stabilize our core Medicare funding and Medi-Cal funding,” Gioia said.
Doctors Medical Center failed largely because 80 percent of its patients were covered by Medi-Cal or Medicare, with another 10 percent uninsured. The hospital relied on only 10 percent of its patients for revenue from commercial insurance, an unsustainable model in modern healthcare economics.
“They need to be assured that they would be profitable, and one of the concerns now is President Trump’s proposal to cut Medicaid funding to California would make things even worse. Medical reimbursements are already low, lower than the cost of providing service, and if they cut back, or if they decrease funding to California, the state’s not going to have enough money to backfill that right now,” Gioia said.
Sutter’s new project also includes an expansion of behavioral health services in Berkeley, renovations to emergency departments in Oakland and Castro Valley, and workforce development initiatives. Sutter plans to train 1,000 new physician residents and fellows annually by 2030, with new Family Medicine and Internal Medicine residency programs launching this summer.
Warner Thomas, president and CEO of Sutter Health, said the Emeryville project is part of Sutter's vision to meet the community’s demand for access to services across the East Bay.
“These efforts will allow us to care for more patients while also investing in programs and partnerships that build the healthcare workforce of the future—ensuring more people get the right care when and where they need it,” Thomas said.
State Senator Jesse Arreguín said that with this new medical center, Sutter Health is continuing its commitment to healthcare access in the East Bay region
“Our community has long advocated for expanded healthcare services, and this new facility in Emeryville is a testament to that collective effort,” Arreguín said in a statement. “I look forward to continuing our partnership with Sutter Health to ensure that East Bay residents receive the high-quality emergency and primary care they need and deserve.”
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