Originally appeared in the San Francisco Business Times

By Chris Rauber

Stanford Health Care topped off its $2 billion new hospital structure Monday, placing a 30-foot-long, 3,400-pound beam atop the facility's 18,000-ton steel skeleton.

Hundreds of construction workers and roughly 500 Stanford employees, doctors, community members, donors and elected officials attended a "topping off" ceremony Monday morning. The ceremony celebrated the lifting into place of the structure's final beam.

Stanford Health Care — the entity formerly known as Stanford Hospital & Clinics — has been working on the project for years. The new hospital structure should be completed in 2017 and ready for patients in early 2018, officials said.

It will add 824,000 square feet to the existing Stanford Hospital campus, "modernize and replace existing services" and expand the hospital's intensive care and emergency departments.

The new building was designed by Rafael Vinoly Architects and medical planners Lee, Burkhart, Liu Inc. Clark/McCarthy is the project's joint-venture general contractor, made up of Clark Construction and McCarthy Building Cos.

Among the Stanford officials who took part in the ceremony were Amir Dan Rubin, Stanford Health Care's president and CEO; John Levin, chairman of the system's board of directors; Dr. Lloyd Minor, dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, the system's CFODaniel Morissette, and Bert Hurlbut, vice president of new Stanford Hospital construction.

Stanford Health Care falls under the Stanford Medicine umbrella, along with the medical school and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford, which is engaged in its own $1.1 billion rebuild.