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$50 million donation to Mission Hospital will help fund new tower, campus expansion

March 10, 2025

A new tower at Providence Mission Hospital that will re-center the Mission Viejo campus and provide more patient rooms, a state-of-the-art surgery center and the latest in cardiac care for a growing South Orange County is getting a funding boost from the largest donation in the hospital’s history.

Announcing the $50 million gift from the family descendants of the owners of the sprawling ranch known as Rancho Mission Viejo, hospital officials said the gift will go toward an overall $712 million expansion project and they hope it will kickstart the philanthropy-funded portion of the campaign.

Work on the new Tower 3 will begin this year; demolition of the storage area where the tower will go has already started. The three-story tower — a portion will be subterranean because it’s being built into a nearby hillside — is expected to be completed by 2030. A 3-acre park will surround the tower – available for use by patients, visitors and hospital staff, reducing the feel of a concrete jungle, officials said.

The Rancho Mission Veijo family also donated in 1969 the land on which the hospital is built.

“Our first donor has become our largest donor 50 years later,” said Nicole Balsamo, president and chief philanthropy officer of the Providence Mission Hospital Foundation. “It’s pretty incredible.”

The O’Neill and Flood families – descendents of James Flood and Richard O’Neill who in 1907 became partners on the working ranch that later became known as Rancho Mission Viejo – owned much of the land that South Orange County has been built on and helped develop the communities of Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margaria, Coto de Casa, Ladera Ranch and Talega in San Clemente. The namesake Rancho Mission Viejo community is still being built out.

In all, development of the former ranch has already brought 75,000 homes to the area.

The last community’s development — located on 8,000 of the still 24,000-acre ranch with 16,000 acres remaining as open space — is already at 20,000 residents. The full community buildout, said Jeremy Laster, president of Rancho Mission Viejo, will be about 42,000 people.

“We now have about 225,000 people who live on lands that were once Rancho Mission Viejo,” he said. “When you look at a hospital in Mission Viejo, which is a community we developed, 40% of the patients there come from residential units that we developed. So, part of the genesis of why we think it’s important to be a leader is because we kinda created the problem. We are the reason there is a need for a hospital in South Orange County.”

Providence Mission Hospital leadership and donors in Mission Viejo on Monday, March 3, 2025. (Photo by Paul Rodriguez)

A couple of years ago, hospital officials announced a master facilities plan that discussed the overall expansion, including the new tower, of the Mission Viejo campus.

The tower, which will be named the Rancho Mission Viejo Family Tower, will have 100 private patient rooms. It will also have the hospital’s first hybrid operating room and an expanded emergency department with a Level II pediatric and adult trauma center and acute care operations.

Cardiac care will be enhanced with cardiac catheterization, electrophysiology suites and an entire new cardiac department, hospital officials said.

This will pair well, said Seth Teigen, CEO of Providence Mission, with the hospital’s Comprehensive Cardiac Care certification, which it recently received from the Joint Commission, a nonprofit that accredits hospitals nationwide. The hospital is one of four in the state to have the accreditation.

“It’s a really big deal, we’re only one of two in Orange County,” Teigen said. “Our sister ministry at St. Joe’s in Orange also has that accolade. That informed part of the focus around cardiac.”

The certification indicates the hospital has met certain criteria of clinical outcomes, physician and nursing staff expertise and infrastructure that supports patients and promotes best practices and the most current care guidelines, said Dr. Melanie Spencer Wolf, chief medical officer.

“It’s a significant honor,” she said. “It’s one of numerous certifications we have from the Joint Commission. We’re really proud of that.”

Wolf said the hospital has been seeing a higher rate of cardiac admissions, thousands of people a year, especially with the aging population, and there has been a focus on using a less invasive approach to treatment. As an example, she said 10 years ago, a valve replacement required open heart surgery. Now, she said, surgeons have procedures where they can go into an artery and use a guidewire that goes into the heart for placing a new valve.

“They can essentially do a valve replacement the same way as getting a needle into your arm or leg.” she said. “This allows for easy recovery and a return to quality of life almost immediately. We’re really moving away from these aggressive interventions and moving toward less invasive measures.”

Teigen illustrated another example of how the new tower’s facilities will help the hospital meet patient needs: the increase in the number of surgeries doctors have performed since the opening of the Leonard Cancer Center in 2019. The tower will offer another facility for doing more surgeries.

“We have seen cancer activity going up 30% year over year,” he said. “We’re really blessed to have a medical staff that touts themselves surgically as one of the best medical staffs in the country in types of oncologic surgery. “

The tower will feature state-of-the-art surgery facilities that will help attract and retain the next generation of “brilliant physicians” to the community, added Teigen.

“We want to give the scientists and clinical experts the tools in the toolbox, the type of facilities, equipment and technology to really deliver on our promise to our patients,” Teigen said. “That is a big driver also in this expansion plan adding all these new operating rooms.”

The construction of the new tower will also reorientate the campus. Today, the entrance used by patients who go to the Emergency Department is the same as the entrance used by fire trucks, ambulances, police, and all the pedestrian traffic. In the future, first responders will use the current ER entrance only. The new ER entrance will be flipped around to the front of the campus, where the hospital’s main lobby is today.

Hospital officials are calling the family’s donation “transformational” for the hospital. And said they are hopeful it will inspire others to contribute.

“We’ve been very fortunate and blessed over the last 60 years,” Laster said, speaking for Tony Moiso, who has headed up the family ranch for decades. “We also recognize our successes are, in part, because we’ve developed great schools, great parks, great amenities, and we also recognize a big piece of that is also having a world-class hospital. And, it’s something people see; it’s a reason why they feel comfortable moving to the community.”

“We helped originally to get the hospital off the ground,” he added. “Now we think, it’s our responsibility and, in a way, our obligation to help Mission Hospital to grow because we have grown.”

$50 million donation to Mission Hospital will help fund new tower, campus expansion Orange County Register

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$50 million donation to Mission Hospital will help fund new tower, campus expansion

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