New teaching hospital lands $25 million gift

Guess what well-known health-oriented foundation is giving a $25 million matching gift to help build Austin’s new teaching hospital?

That’s right. The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation’s pledge to match private donations to the Seton Healthcare Family’s new hospital, dollar for dollar, puts fund raising “way ahead of schedule,” Seton’s President and CEO Jesús Garza said Tuesday. The hospital will be called the Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas when it opens in 2017 as the main place for training new doctors and medical students at the UT Dell Medical School.

“With the Dell Medical School being built right now, we felt like this was a great next step,” Susan Dell, co-founder and chairwoman of the foundation board, said at a news conference.

The hospital and school will “work in concert to change the way that medicine is taught and the way that health care is delivered,” she said. “We will have state-of-the-art treatments for our patients, we’ll be able to attract the best talent in the country to our health care team here in Central Texas and one of Michael and my biggest goals is always about elevating the level of health care for the entire community...

“This project here helps us do this, and I’m very excited about it.”

With Tuesday’s pledge retroactively covering more than $8 million already raised, Seton is well on its way to raising $50 million in private donations for the $295 million hospital. It has less than $17 million more to raise privately. The remaining $245 million for the project is coming from Seton and its parent, Ascension Health.

Since 2003, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation has donated $168 million, including Tuesday’s pledge, to health care projects in Central Texas.

Dell said she thought it was important to make the hospital gift a matching donation. “I’ve always liked challenge grants because I think it’s really important for the whole community to have ownership in projects like this,” she said.

The 211-bed hospital is under construction now in downtown Austin, across the street from the hospital it is replacing at 15th and Red River streets, University Medical Center Brackenridge. UMC Brackenridge will close when Seton opens the new hospital.

Two years ago, a gift of $50 million from the Dell family foundation helped launch the Dell Medical School, which is opening in summer 2016. Appropriately, Tuesday’s announcement was made at Dell Children’s Medical Center, a Seton hospital that the foundation helped finance by giving $31 million.