What it means
HonorHealth is the corporate name of Scottsdale’s hospitals, and the surest sign you are new in town is using it. Locals say Osborn, Shea or Thompson Peak, the three campuses, the way they say Fashion Square instead of its owner’s name. “They took her to Shea” means the big hospital at 92nd Street and Shea Boulevard. “He’s at Osborn” means the original hospital beside the Civic Center, now the Level I trauma center. “Thompson Peak” means the newer one north of the Loop 101, in the land of the gated communities.
The system behind the three is a nonprofit that grew from a one-story Baptist-run hospital opened on Osborn Road in May 1962, for a city of about 10,000, into a network of nine hospitals and more than 17,000 employees, Scottsdale’s biggest medical employer alongside Mayo. Its names changed with its size: Scottsdale Memorial, Scottsdale Healthcare, and after a 2013 merger with Phoenix’s John C. Lincoln hospitals, the invented word it carries now. The whole story, decade by decade, is the site’s HonorHealth guide; this entry is about the word and the three names locals use instead.
Where you’ll meet it
On the hospital signs along Osborn Road, Shea Boulevard and Thompson Peak Parkway; on the urgent-care storefronts across the city; on insurance cards and bills; on the ambulances, which are often run by Rural/Metro rather than the city; and in the Scottsdale Memorial Hospital of older residents’ memories.
Where the word came from
The hospital’s names are a history of the city’s ambitions. The first, in 1962, was City Hospital of Scottsdale, operated by the Baptist Hospital Association of Arizona as Scottsdale Baptist Hospital; the Arizona Southern Baptist Convention handed it to a local board in 1970 and 1971, and the board called it Scottsdale Memorial Hospital, the name a generation of Scottsdale children were born under. A second hospital, Scottsdale Memorial Hospital North, opened in open desert at 92nd Street and Shea on January 4, 1984, with First Lady Nancy Reagan at the ribbon. In 1998, with two hospitals and a growing outpatient business, the company became Scottsdale Healthcare, and the campuses took the names people use now: Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn and Scottsdale Healthcare Shea. Thompson Peak opened north of the 101 in 2007 as the third.
The merger that created the current name came in October 2013. John C. Lincoln Health Network, built on the north Phoenix hospital named for the industrialist and philanthropist whose story is at John C. Lincoln, combined with Scottsdale Healthcare into Scottsdale Lincoln Health Network, a name with the charm of a law firm. Two years of branding later, on March 30, 2015, the network announced it would be HonorHealth. CEO Tom Sadvary’s explanation was that the system was “honored to put patients at the center of everything we do.” The practical explanation is that a hospital in Sunnyslope could not be called Scottsdale, a hospital on Shea could not be called Lincoln, and a merged system needed a word that offended neither city. Honor was available.
The campuses kept their place names as suffixes: HonorHealth Scottsdale Osborn Medical Center, HonorHealth Scottsdale Shea Medical Center, HonorHealth Scottsdale Thompson Peak Medical Center, HonorHealth John C. Lincoln Medical Center, HonorHealth Deer Valley. Locals dropped the prefix the day the signs went up.
What it is not
HonorHealth is not Mayo. The Mayo Clinic campus on Shea Boulevard, two miles east of HonorHealth Shea, is a separate institution, and “Shea” without a qualifier means HonorHealth’s hospital, not Mayo’s clinic; the site’s Mayo Clinic in Arizona guide covers the difference. HonorHealth is not Banner either, though Banner is coming to the north end of town. And it is not a city department, despite the 1962 name.
The fine print
The system’s current shape, from its own reporting and Wikipedia’s summary: nine acute-care hospitals, including Sonoran Crossing in north Phoenix (opened 2020) and Mountain Vista in Mesa; about 1,400 staffed beds; more than 17,000 employees and 4,000-plus medical staff; over 200 clinics and two dozen urgent cares; revenue above $2 billion. Corporate offices are on North Hayden Road in Scottsdale, which keeps the headquarters, if not the name, in the city that started it. Osborn holds the Level I trauma center, the designation that means it takes the worst injuries from the entire northeast Valley, including the Loop 101 and the Preserve’s trailheads.
Two things the record does not settle, as the site’s organization guide notes. Nobody has documented who organized the 1962 hospital or how the money was raised; the Baptist operator, the Osborn Road site and the May opening are the certainties. And the holding-company names between 1971 and 1998 are muddled in later histories, so “Scottsdale Memorial” here stands for a family of names.
The civic point is that Scottsdale, a city of 240,000, has three full hospitals and the region’s trauma center inside its limits because a 1960s board of trustees chose to build rather than merge into a Phoenix system. The 2013 merger reversed that half a century later, on Scottsdale’s terms: the headquarters stayed, and the Phoenix hospitals took the Scottsdale-born system’s new name.