America’s health care system is approaching a structural breaking point: demand is rising, hospitals are operating under sustained capacity pressure, and the number of patients requiring complex, continuous care is growing faster than the system was designed to accommodate. In response, UC San Diego Health and West Health have launched a six-year, $40 million initiative intended to redesign how care is coordinated and delivered. Called the West Health Accelerator at UC San Diego Health, the program will begin in San Diego but is being developed as a model that could ultimately be adopted by health systems across the United States.
The initiative arrives as the nation’s demographic profile changes rapidly. By 2030, one in five Americans is expected to be 65 or older, a shift that will increase demand for care involving multiple chronic conditions, frequent specialist visits, medication management, rehabilitation and support at home. Older adults are also more likely to move between emergency departments, inpatient units, outpatient clinics and community services, creating opportunities for delays, duplicated testing and communication failures. The Accelerator is designed to address those weak points by treating the patient’s entire health journey as a connected system rather than as a series of isolated clinical encounters.
At its core, the program seeks to make care more predictable, coordinated and responsive. Patients may enter the health system through a first referral, an emergency visit or a scheduled procedure, then move among specialists, hospitals, rehabilitation services and primary care providers. The Accelerator aims to ensure that information, responsibility and clinical decision-making follow the patient through each transition. That means helping people reach the right clinician at the appropriate time, reducing unnecessary handoffs and directing care to the setting best suited to the patient’s condition—whether that is a hospital, an ambulatory clinic, a virtual appointment or, when appropriate, the patient’s home.
The first phase will operate across UC San Diego Health’s three hospitals and expanding network of clinics. A central component will be the expansion of “mission control,” an around-the-clock coordination hub that combines clinical operations, electronic health record data and advanced digital technologies. In technical terms, such a hub can function as a real-time command layer for a health system, integrating information about bed availability, referrals, appointments, patient acuity, staffing and care transitions. By making these data streams visible in one operational environment, clinicians and administrators can identify bottlenecks earlier and intervene before a delay becomes a crisis.
Mission control is expected to build on the electronic health record rather than replace it. The health record contains extensive information about diagnoses, medications, laboratory results, imaging and prior encounters, but those data are not always organized for immediate operational decision-making. The Accelerator will work to transform fragmented clinical information into actionable signals, allowing care teams to determine which patients need follow-up, which transitions require attention and where capacity is available. The goal is not simply to collect more data, but to connect the data to decisions that affect access, safety and continuity.
The program will also extend UC San Diego Health’s work in virtual care and wearable technologies. Remote monitoring devices can measure physiological signals such as heart rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, activity and sleep, depending on the device and clinical application. When integrated responsibly with clinical workflows, these measurements may help care teams recognize deterioration between visits or support recovery after a procedure. Virtual care can similarly reduce the need for some in-person appointments while allowing clinicians to assess symptoms, review medication use and guide patients through ongoing treatment. The challenge is ensuring that digital tools generate timely clinical responses instead of creating another stream of unreviewed information.
That challenge will be addressed through the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Center for Health Innovation at UC San Diego Health, which focuses on the ethical development and deployment of technology in patient care. The center provides a foundation for testing new tools before they are integrated into routine practice. Technologies developed through the Accelerator can be evaluated not only for technical performance, but also for clinical usefulness, workflow compatibility, privacy, equity and measurable effects on patients and health professionals. A digital system that is accurate in a laboratory but difficult to use in a crowded emergency department will not improve care; the initiative therefore places implementation science alongside technological development.
The partnership also builds on more than a decade of collaboration between UC San Diego Health and West Health around the needs of an aging population. The organizations helped establish California’s first accredited senior emergency care unit, the Gary and Mary West Emergency Department at Jacobs Medical Center in La Jolla. That effort contributed to San Diego County becoming the first region in the country where every hospital received Geriatric Emergency Department accreditation from the American College of Emergency Physicians. The national network has since grown to hundreds of accredited sites, reflecting a broader movement toward emergency care designed around the medical, functional and social needs of older adults.
For UC San Diego Health, the timing is significant because the academic health system is expanding its geographic reach and its medical and surgical programs. Growth can increase access, but it can also make coordination more difficult as patients and clinicians interact across multiple campuses and outpatient locations. The Accelerator is intended to create common standards for how referrals are processed, how information moves between teams and how patients are supported after discharge. Its leaders describe the effort as “tech-forward,” but its central purpose is operational: to make reliable coordination a normal feature of care, regardless of where a patient enters the system.
West Health says the UC San Diego partnership is part of a broader portfolio of collaborations involving organizations such as Northwestern Medicine, Mass General Brigham, Duke-Margolis, the American Hospital Association and the National Committee for Quality Assurance. Those initiatives address areas including geriatric care, behavioral health and value-based care, an approach that links payment and performance to outcomes rather than the volume of services delivered. The new Accelerator will be developed locally, tested in real clinical settings and refined for possible national use. If it succeeds, its most important contribution may be a practical blueprint for integrating people, data and technology into a health system capable of responding to an older and more medically complex population without sacrificing access, safety or human-centered care.
Subject of Research: Health care delivery, coordinated care, health technology, geriatric care and health system innovation
Article Title: UC San Diego Health and West Health Launch $40 Million Accelerator to Redesign Coordinated Care
Web References: https://healthinnovation.ucsd.edu/ ; https://health.ucsd.edu/ ; https://www.westhealth.org/ ; https://today.ucsd.edu/story/first-in-the-nation-all-san-diego-hospitals-now-accredited-for-geriatric-emergency-care
References: UC San Diego Health; West Health; Joan and Irwin Jacobs Center for Health Innovation; American College of Emergency Physicians
Image Credits: Alex Matthews, UC San Diego Health
Keywords: Health care delivery, coordinated care, digital health, virtual care, wearable technology, electronic health records, geriatric care, hospitals, health system innovation, UC San Diego Health, West Health
