CREJ - Healthcare Properties - October 2017
Look around your community and chances are good, you’ll see them. Chances are also high that you’ve used them. Stand-alone health care facilities. These facilities are designed for both patient convenience and a method to increase revenue for health care systems. Stand-alone facilities include emergency departments, imaging departments, surgical departments, dialysis centers, arthritis clinics and more. These stand-alone medical facilities are often affiliated with a health care system and are being used not only as a location to provide distributed care on an outpatient basis, but also as a feeder system for the parent hospital. For patients, they offer the convenience of easy, nearby parking and less walking. Elderly patients can often park within 50 feet of the reception desk. The smaller, more convenient buildings also are less intimidating to patients. Children avoid the scare of walking through winding hallways of a crowded hospital to get to the imaging department and elderly patients avoid the challenges of wayfinding through large facilities to have a minor surgical procedure. According to a 2015 Consumer Reports study, an even more compelling advantage of these facilities is that the smaller size and reduced patient population of stand-alone facilities decreases patient risk of health care-associated infections. HAIs are infections patients contract while receiving medical treatment in a health care facility. HAIs are a continual issue for health care environments, especially in hospitals. A recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that one out of 20 hospital patients will contract a health care-associated infection. General contractors, in conjunction with design and engineering teams, are tasked with creating an infrastructure that meets owner goals, budgets and timelines, and discovering innovative methods to meet health care system needs for convenience on a small budget. Cost, specifically low cost, is a factor that makes it easy for health care facilities to construct stand-alone facilities. Construction costs for a 10,000- to 20,000-square-foot stand-alone medical facility in Colorado can range from $4 million to $7 million, depending on the type of services offered by the facility. Health care providers and systems are faced with the tremendous challenge of being responsive to patient needs while also being lean with facility construction costs. For stand-alone medical facilities affiliated with larger health care systems, specific design standards must be incorporated into the planning, construction and budget of the building. These standards can include MEP, technology systems, environmental/sustainability detail and even general quality and “look and feel” of finishes. Another primary consideration for stand-alone health care facilities is patient satisfaction and comfort. Owners want their facility design to include technology enhancements, such as personalized room temperature, access to movies and music, as well as digital access to interactive educational tools that help them understand their medical condition. Prefabricated construction is an ideal option for building efficiently and on a tight budget, while still offering quality craftsmanship. Because it occurs in a weather resistant facility offsite from the finished building location, prefabricated construction is not affected by foot and vehicle traffic, weather or limited work space. Prefabrication can include the walls, the glazing and MEP systems, to name a few. In some cases, entire rooms are prefabricated and delivered to the construction site. Prefabricated construction also can reduce labor- and resource-related delays introduced during the construction process. Networking technology systems also are often prefabricated offsite and delivered to the facility during the construction process. This technology infrastructure is vital to medical facilities today, as health care systems digitally track patients, staff and equipment as a standard practice. Designing and building technology systems that allow health care providers to safely share patient information digitally between doctors onsite or remotely to larger health care systems also is a requirement for stand-alone facility owners. As contractors, we need to understand the owner goals, both current and future, for their stand-alone medical facilities. It’s also our responsibility to review all possible scenarios with the owner and assure they understand their options and choices before we build the finished product.