Following a recent office park purchase in Pleasanton, Stanford Health Care-ValleyCare will be rebranding its name this month to reflect its expansion of services to the Tri-Valley, said Mino Sastry, vice president of service lines and market development.

Sastry, a San Ramon resident who has been with Stanford Health Care for 10 years, told the Weekly that since acquiring ValleyCare Health System in 2015, Stanford has been aiming to grow in the Tri-Valley.

He said rebranding the name to Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley and purchasing a five-building office complex inside the Hacienda Lakes office center in Pleasanton will allow for more high quality Stanford specific services to be offered in the area.

"We have the ability now with this new purchase to really expand not just direct health care patient delivery, although that's the primary goal, but a lot of other things in terms of science and technology and partnerships and innovation," Sastry said.

The Stanford-ValleyCare name was a connection to the original ValleyCare Health System, which was acquired by Stanford Health at a time when ValleyCare Health was seeking a partner to remedy its financial difficulties.

Along with the Hospital Committees for the Livermore Pleasanton Areas, Stanford paid $58.4 million for the office park, which is bounded by Willow Road, Inglewood Drive, Hacienda Drive and Gibraltar Drive. The office complex, which originally belonged to Schnitzer Properties, an Oregon-based real estate firm, totals 197,200 square feet.

Sastry said that the organization has been tracking the population growth in the Tri-Valley over the years and that despite having the main hospital in Pleasanton, there are plenty of programs that are not available for the growing number of people.

"While they may have specialists here and there, really a lot of these folks are traveling to San Francisco to Stanford to John Muir into other high end facilities and so we wanted to be able to provide a lot of those higher levels of care locally to their community," he said.

"At some point we've maximized our capacity in our existing footprint," Sastry added. "So what this allows us to do is to expand the same services, but also to offer so to grow deeper in certain services and be able to see more patients."

Some of the services he said Stanford will be bringing to the new office park location will be bringing in a second surgical center, additional clinic space and multidisciplinary clinics.

The new office space already has one building housing the Stanford Primary Care and Family Medicine services, which opened in March and provides access to internal medicine, family medicine and endocrinology, as well as laboratory, onsite X-ray and ultrasound services.

The expansion to the Pleasanton location also means that Stanford will be recruiting and hiring new people, something Sastry said will not only be good for patients, but for the economy.

He also said that with the expansion into the Tri-Valley and even the Central Valley, Stanford will be seeking to partner with existing health care providers in the area to better understand the needs of the patients in the area.

"We're not just plopping any services down and just expecting it to work," Sastry said. "It's understanding the needs of our community, also understanding the needs of the existing providers in this market. These are the folks we're listening to, these are the folks that are treating patients today that are saying we need this, we need that."

As for the timeline in opening up services in the new office space, Sastry said the hope is to get things up and running within the next two years with more to come in the next decade. He added that the current tenants in about 50% of the new space will not be disturbed as Stanford works with the other half of the space.

For now he said there is still a lot of work to be done before patients can stop having to drive to the peninsula to seek specialized health care.

"I've seen my friends and family that are in this area. I've heard them talk about what they need," Sastry said. "I also heard them talking about how exciting it is to see a lot of the services that their parents were traveling to Palo Alto for them and see their cardiac surgeon here locally."