The mock hospital has been built on a giant "shake table" which can subject the building to movements similar to real earthquakes.
The tests are designed to determine if hospitals built on rubber bearings could function after a quake.
The use of these rubber bearings is common in earthquake-prone Japan.
The $5m (£3.1m) project also tested whether the bearings could protect other strategically important buildings, such as computer data centres, so they could operate without interruption after a large earthquake.
It is the first time that the bearing system has been tested under a full-scale building on a shake table in the United States.
"What the bearings do is uncouple the building from the motion of the ground during an earthquake, like putting the building on roller skates," said Tara Hutchinson, an engineering professor at the University of California, San Diego.
She said that while most research concentrated on the structural integrity of buildings after an earthquake, very little examined how vital contents such as stairs, lifts and other parts of a building that allowed it to fulfil its function fared after a major seismic event.
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