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Sanford’s $100M Gift to Accelerate Stem Cell-based Therapies

The CEO of a local stem cell company who I spoke with recently joked that UCSD — as the University of California, San Diego used to abbreviate its name before it adopted the short form UC San Diego — should be renamed as UCDS. That would stand for the University of California-Denny Sanford.

That’s because the billionaire businessman and philanthropist just donated $100 million to UC San Diego, with aims to accelerate the development of drugs and cell therapies inspired by and derived from current human stem cell research

The donation is the second largest that UC San Diego has ever received, following only the $110 million gift given 10 years ago by Qualcomm Inc. co-founder Irwin Jacobs and his wife, Joan.

Sanford, a South Dakota businessman who owns a home in La Jolla, is the founder and owner of Sioux Falls, S.D.-based First Premier Bank. He has donated more than $1 billion to health and child-related charities, including a $30 million gift in 2008 to develop San Diego’s Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, which opened in 2011. He also donated $70 million to what is now named the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla.

The new Sanford Center will help San Diego scientists from UC San Diego, Sanford-Burnham, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the Scripps Research Institute and the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology to collaborate on bringing stem cell therapies to patients.

• • •

Scripps Health and Sharp HealthCare recently joined a health information exchange called San Diego Health Connect, a community supported not-for-profit organization that connects hospital systems’ electronic health records.

With the addition of Sharp and Scripps, the number of patient records that could be shared through San Diego Health Connect — with patients’ consent — increases from about 800,000 to more than 2.1 million. This is out of some 3.2 million people in San Diego County.

Other participants in the exchange include Kaiser Permanente San Diego Medical Center, UC San Diego Health System, Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego, VA San Diego Healthcare System, Family Health Centers of San Diego and 14 community clinics coordinated through the Council of Community Clinics.

“Sharing information about a patient at the point of care, with the patient’s consent, informs a physician’s decisions about testing and treatment, and it ultimately improves the quality of care,” San Diego Health Connect Executive Director Daniel Chavez said. “Our exchange uses nationally established protocols that adhere to the highest standards for privacy and data security.”

San Diego Health Connect is the successor to the largest of the 17 Beacon Community projects that received a total of $250 million in three-year grants from the Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Since federal funding ended Sept. 30, San Diego Health Connect has been operational with support from community health care organizations.

The health care providers participating with San Diego Health Connect have access to important health information about patients, no matter where he or she is being treated.

With a patient’s permission, the health systems can receive information about previous test results, treatments, medication and allergy lists, hospital discharge summaries and history of care. Quick, easy access to such data is critical in emergencies and helpful in other situations when a patient visits providers with multiple health systems, Chavez said.

San Diego Health Connect now charges a subscription fee to participating hospitals, ranging from about $500 at the smallest clinics to about $200,000 for the larger hospital networks, Chavez said. This gives the hospitals access to a suite of services, including medical record exchanges, secure email and public health reporting to San Diego County.

Now that Scripps and Sharp have come on board, San Diego Health Connect has aims to add Palomar Health System, Tri-City Medical Center, Paradise Valley Hospital and others to the network in hopes of encapsulating the entire San Diego patient population, Chavez said. The goal is to add the rest of the hospitals and clinics to San Diego Health Connect by the end of 2014.

“The broader implications of adding Sharp and Scripps to our system is that it helps us achieve critical mass,” Chavez said. “It’s like developing a shopping mall. You want the anchor tenants to increase the traffic.”

Send news about locally based health care organizations, biotech and clean tech to Meghana Keshavan at mkeshavan@sdbj.com. She can be reached at 858-277-6359.

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