In addition to acting as the area's main healthcare resource, it will be one of the largest trauma centers in Southern California, serving more than 1,500 victims annually. The medical center will also serve as the major burn center between Phoenix and Los Angeles.

The 350-foot-tall patient tower, with its distinctively curved exterior, is composed of single-patient rooms rather than the open-ward arrangements common in county hospitals. Each floor of the tower is designed as three triangular 24-bed nursing units. The 373-bed center includes six medical/surgical nursing units, a telemetry unit, maternal and child health nursing units, a variety of outpatient clinics, three psychiatric units, and six specialized intensive care nursing units, including a burn unit.

Situated just nine miles from the San Andreas and two miles from the San Jacinto active fault lines, the new center is designed to remain self-sufficient for a minimum of three days after an 8.3 magnitude earthquake. The facility uses a combination of elastomeric base isolators and hydraulic viscous dampers (similar to those used in an MX missile silo) to absorb the energy generated during a seismic event and to protect the building's structural integrity.

In addition, the three core buildings--the nursing tower, diagnostic and treatment center, and outpatient clinic--are linked with 14-foot-long telescoping corridors, called portals. These portals, along with flexible roof/joint and extension wall covers, will enable the four-foot gaps between the three buildings to close to as little as four inches or open as wide as eight feet. Between the portals and buildings, tracks will permit transverse movement of 44 inches.

The installation of the base isolators, viscous damping devices, telescoping portals, and specially manufactured ball joints allows the buildings to move almost two feet in either direction. A combination of ball joints for wet pipe, flexible pipes for dry pipe, and deflection fittings for electrical connections provide enough movement, yet fit within the space limitation of the project.

In addition to being the largest base-isolated hospital ever built, the Arrowhead Regional Medical Center is the first facility in the U.S. to use film-less radiology hospital-wide. This system makes digital images, which are instantly available for viewing at multiple stations throughout the facility for faster and more accurate diagnosis.

The on-site construction staff also developed the Document Administration and Cost Control System (DACCS) to keep an accurate history of revisions to the more than 3,000 sheets of construction drawings and the nine bulletins with more than 400 sheets of drawings, and to track the documents which create those revisions along with their associated costs. The intranet-based system linked these documents to each other as they were generated allowing the construction team, the architect, and the county to attain the latest drawing version as well as the changes leading up to it.