Grace Borsari: How a $10 Million Gift Is Expanding Emergency Care Capacity

Grace Borsari is a Bellingham, Washington entrepreneur who founded Altair Advanced Industries, Inc. (AAI), a company that produced backup power systems for the cable television and broadband industries and grew to employ hundreds of workers worldwide. In 2019, the Whatcom Business Alliance named Grace Borsari Business Person of the Year in recognition of her leadership. Beyond her business career, she is a licensed pilot who has flown aircraft on business assignments across the United States and Europe, and she supports scholarships for women pursuing careers in advanced materials and computer science. Grace Borsari and Fred Kaiser recently made a $10 million gift to PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center supporting the Stronger Together campaign, which includes a unified emergency department designed to serve Whatcom County’s growing population.

Fred Kaiser and Grace Borsari’s $10 million gift to PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center supports the Stronger Together campaign, including the Peter Paulsen Pavilion and a unified emergency department. Whatcom County’s 2025 population estimate reached 236,392, a 4.2 percent increase from the 2020 estimate base. That growth figure does not measure hospital demand on its own, but it provides context for regional emergency capacity.

Emergency care space includes more than the area where patients wait. It includes the places where staff receive patients, sort urgency, provide treatment, monitor changes, and move patients toward discharge, transfer, or admission. Triage means the process trained healthcare staff use to sort patients by the severity of their condition and the order in which they need care.

In many cases, emergency departments face pressure because they receive many needs at once. Patients may arrive via emergency medical services or directly to the emergency department, and some require hospital admission after initial treatment. Congestion can build when patient volume, case severity, available beds, staffing, communication, or diagnostic delays strain the department simultaneously.

Patient flow describes the movement of patients through care settings from arrival to discharge. In emergency care, that path can include assessment, treatment, diagnostic work, discharge, transfer, or admission to another hospital unit. Emergency department pressure has three interconnected stages: demand entering the department, work occurring within the department, and the hospital’s ability to move patients to the next care setting.

One pressure point is boarding. Boarding happens when a patient who needs admission remains in the emergency department while waiting for an inpatient bed, transfer, or another care location. Boarding and crowding raise patient safety and quality-of-care concerns, so the issue involves more than comfort or convenience.

The Kaiser-Borsari gift supports a planned unified emergency department. That project matters because layout affects how teams see patients, reach rooms, communicate, and work across critical care areas. Internal spaces, corridor design, nurse station placement, patient visibility, teamwork, staff walking distance, and direct-care time all shape how care teams work. A unified department therefore functions as a layout and coordination investment, not as a guarantee that every emergency delay disappears.

Next, the Peter Paulsen Pavilion gives the boarding issue a facility-level connection. The six-story, 120,000-square-foot addition includes advanced inpatient care floors, women’s and children’s services, private rooms, a rooftop helipad, and capacity for 320 beds. Added inpatient capacity can address one contributor to emergency department crowding: the need for admitted patients to leave the emergency department for the next care setting.

Private rooms add another practical layer to the expansion. Single rooms support communication, privacy, infection-control planning, and noise reduction, but they still require attention to patient visibility and staff walking distance. That balance matters because room type helps patients only when the larger layout still supports caregiver access, monitoring, and safe movement through the hospital.

Moreover, the rooftop helipad adds a separate access point for time-sensitive care. Air medical transport matters when distance, geography, traffic, or the time needed to reach specialized care affects how quickly a patient reaches the right setting. Emergency space, therefore, includes both rooms inside the hospital and access routes connecting patients to the hospital.

As Whatcom County grows, the practical measure is whether emergency care has enough usable options during busy periods. A hospital needs places to assess patients, treat urgent problems, admit patients, and route time-sensitive cases without turning one delay into pressure on the whole department. Emergency care space matters when it gives the hospital more ways to respond before crowding shapes the patient experience.

About Grace Borsari

Grace Borsari is the founder of Altair Advanced Industries, Inc., a Bellingham, Washington company that built backup power systems for the broadband and cable television industries, growing to more than 450 local employees and 1,000 worldwide. The Whatcom Business Alliance named her Business Person of the Year in 2019. A licensed pilot originally from Switzerland, she serves on the board of the Innovative Resource Center and supports scholarship opportunities for women in technical fields.