Kaiser Permanente is preparing to submit plans to the city for the company's first new hospital in San Francisco in over 70 years, and it would replace its existing hospital at Geary and Divisadero.

The new 14-story Kaiser hospital, which would rise across Geary Boulevard from the existing one, would have an expanded emergency room, 300 private in-patient beds, and about 623,000 total square feet, as the Chronicle reports, and construction could be complete by 2033.

The new project would not impact Kaiser's other SF facilities in Mission Bay or the Inner Richmond, officials say, and the existing hospital at Geary and Divisadero would continue to operate as usual throughout the construction. Ultimately, the 239-bed hospital that was built in 1954 would be converted into medical offices.

Plans for the hospital were presented at a community meeting Monday at Kaiser's Geary Boulevard campus, ahead of a submission of plans to the SF Planning Department next month. Part of the land that will be constructed on, at the corner of Divisadero and Geary, was a former gas station that has in recent years served as a community garden — and at least one area resident, per the Chronicle, said it wasn't the best use of the land.

The remainder of the site of the new hospital includes a medical office building and two parking garages.

In a statement to the Chronicle, Kaiser's senior vice president and area manager for the Golden Gate Service Area, Abhishek Dosi, says, "We’re really excited about the possibility of doing this," adding that the company is only "at the beginning of the beginning" of the process.

Still, the design process appears to have been underway for some time, by architecture firm Perkins & Will. This will be Kaiser's third all-electric hospital, after similar facilities that have been built in Sacramento and San Jose.

Kaiser Permanente, which is a non-profit, integrated managed care health system, was co-founded in Oakland in 1945 by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser and physician Sidney Garfield in order to serve the healthcare needs of workers at Kaiser's steel mills, shipyards, and other companies. While each territory's Kaiser medical group operates as a for-profit partnership, they are funded by the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, which has grown into one of the largest nonprofits in the nation.

Kaiser serves around 245,000 patients in San Francisco alone, and 12.6 million across nine states and the District of Columbia.

Kaiser's new hospital plans come a decade after competitor CPMC/Sutter Health began constructing its new state-of-the-art hospital on Van Ness Avenue — which saw its first patients arrive a year before the pandemic, in March 2019.

If all goes well with permits and approvals, Kaiser plans to begin construction on the new facillity by late 2028.

Previously: Kaiser and Healthcare Workers Reach Tentative Deal, Ending Largest Healthcare Strike In U.S. History