Planning a Microhospital Campus for Entry Into a New Market
CHALLENGE
A rural health system in in the Mid-Atlantic region completed a strategic planning process that led it to the conclusion that its long-term success and sustainability was to expand its service area into an adjacent region that is more lucrative and growing. To do so, the health system decided that opening a 30-bed microhospital with an attached ambulatory care center was the right path forward. The health system had never designed and constructed a new hospital from the ground up. It needed to do so leveraging the knowledge and expertise of staff used to working in a hospital nearly 10 times the size of the planned microhospital.
Baseline strategy validation
Patient consumer demographic analysis
Patient consumer experiential analysis
Provider consumer experiential analysis
Future-state patient journey mapping
Co-creation sessions to explore tomorrow’s healthcare and the consumer experience
Customized demand projections
Key room forecast
Space programming
Blocking, stacking and key adjacencies
Concept development
Clinical design peer review
APPROACH
With speed to market and a tight budget the primary project drivers, the team leveraged an accelerated planning and design process focused on validating planning assumptions and work effort to date. Our integrated approach to volume forecasting, programming and continuous cost estimating was focused on ensuring the final design solution achieved the goals of access, affordability and convenience. Deep dives into the local patient and provider consumers drove planning and experiential decisions that will differentiate this new campus from other healthcare providers in the region.
RESULTS
A hospital program was developed, including overnight beds, emergency department, imaging, surgical services and all related ancillary and support services. Attached to the hospital is an ambulatory care center offering clinics, outpatient rehab, and retail healthcare services including a community pharmacy. Building stacking and adjacencies were optimized to reduce patient and provider travel distances while ensuring proper segregations between patient, visitor, staff and logistical circulations. Through a series of decision accelerator sessions, the final campus solution was kept within the budget parameters established by the client as an early metric of project success.
The project is currently in the final planning stages and will commence construction in 2022.