By George Bischalaney, President & CEO, Eden Medical Center

The Next Generation Hospital. The new Sutter Medical Center, Castro Valley.

Hello, and welcome to our new Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley blog. As CEO, I want to introduce our new blog site and invite you to participate in conversations with us as about the new hospital and medical office building that will replace Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley. I’m very excited to be able to share information and engage with you as we create a state-of-the-art medical complex from design, through the regulatory approval process and finally through each phase of construction, up to the opening in early 2013. It is a long, exciting journey and I look forward to taking you along.

It is clear to us that we need to hear from you, our extended community—patients, neighbors, employees, physicians and business partners—in order to help us meet our goals. We know that many of you who are reading this blog will have strong opinions you would like to share with us. We too feel that communication should not be only one-way. We believe that all of us are more effective when we work together and collaborate to solve problems, address questions openly and discuss issues of importance to the entire community. After all, this is your community hospital and medical center, and we are here to serve your health needs as well as we possibly can. This is our primary goal.

To fulfill that mission and our pledge to include the community in building a medical center that will serve everyone’s needs, we have launched a Social Media outreach program using the Web to not only keep you informed, but to give you a chance to interact with us so we can address your questions and concerns. Our blog will serve as your Internet “headquarters,” where you can find updated information and links to our main Eden Medical Center web site, plus links to other popular online social networks where we have started groups and online communities for further discussion about the new medical center.

Through a variety of social media tools, including our blog, Internet video clips, podcasts, popular social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, FriendFeed and others, you will get regular updates on our progress, plus you’ll have the opportunity to comment back, ask questions, and give us your opinions and perspectives. You’ll be able to converse with hospital administrators, the architects, our Social Media project team, clinical staff and other key people from Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley. We’ll feature posts from guest bloggers, as well as podcast and Web video interviews.

By the way, we did a survey about the community’s use of social media and social networks, but if you did not know about it before, your input is still very valuable to us. You can still take the short, fun Social Media Survey.

We would love to know if you are aware of other social or online neighborhood networks that we may not have covered, such as a Yahoo, Google, AOL or Ning groups. If so, please let us know. We would be glad to participate on already existing online neighborhood, business or other networks to provide information and discuss relevant matters with your communities.

To date, much of the work in bringing our vision to reality has been behind the scenes. Our design team has worked closely with physicians, employees and medical center trustees to help envision our future campus. In the very near future, we will have more detailed exterior images that highlight the buildings and the campus changes. Much of this is still subject to refinement to meet local and State approvals.

We invite you to subscribe to our blog by email or RSS feed…please note the box above, where you can enter your email address, or you can click on the orange RSS symbol above it to subscribe in an online reader (such as Google Reader). Your email address will remain private and will not be shared with other organizations for commercial purposes. If you subscribe, you’ll be alerted by email or in your reader whenever there is a new post to read on our blog.

If you want more information about Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley, you can find basic information on our About page.

For healthcare information, please visit our main web site.

Thank you for visiting, and please feel free to leave a comment or question in the space below. We’ll be glad to respond within a day or two.

George Bischalaney
President & CEO
Eden Medical Center