APPLETON, Wis.—Hospitals are increasingly finding ways to segregate patient space from operational space for safety and efficiency reasons, and one Wisconsin hospital took to the air to maintain that separation.

Marshfield Clinic Health System wanted a way to connect its existing hospital with an existing east wing building but building at ground level would have significantly disrupted daily operations. Instead, construction teams were tasked with building a “tunnel in the sky” to transport patients, linens, food, and supplies needed for everyday support.

The Boldt Company worked with HGA Architects to create a connector bridge 600 feet long that varied in height from 20 feet to 50 feet above the ground. The structure consisted of ten steel trusses, the longest of which was 70 feet weighing about 45 tons. The entire structure rested on helical piles screwed into the soil at least 30 feet to anchor the connector.

The thought of building the connector on site was immediately swapped for offsite prefabrication.

According to Boldt it was an issue of access. “If we had built on-site, the entire loading dock would have been shut down and the public road would have been closed for a long time,” said Heather Stoffel, senior director of healthcare for Boldt. “It was a timing issue, and time is money.”

To ensure the hospital continued to serve patients during construction, crews left access open to the loading dock and helipad. Patient transport from the helipad to the hospital was done through a tunnel of temporary shipping containers Boldt crews sourced and installed for safe access through the construction site to the facility.

“We first looked at the project and thought we couldn’t do it the conventional way,” said Bert Schmitz, Boldt project manager. “We had an active helicopter pad on-site and we also had to consider noise variances.” Construction teams working high above street level was also a safety concern for project managers.

The decision was made to prefabricate the trusses on an empty parking lot near the hospital.

“One of the small benefits of COVID was so many employees were working from home, it meant parking lots were less populated,” Stoffel said.

Structural steel was delivered to the staging area and crews built the trusses in a short timeline. For accuracy, crews used their own models to maintain tolerances of +/- ¼ inch so the preassembled sections would fit exactly into the existing structures.

Twelve weeks after construction started, crews were ready to lift the prefabricated truss sections into place. Starting at 5 a.m., crews used a self-propelled modular transport (SPMT) to move the giant sections into place. A 200-ton crane hoisted the sections in the air and crews started work to connect the trusses. The SPMT provided extreme maneuverability on the city street and transport time for each section was about 10 minutes. Once on site, traffic was only impacted for one day per truss section, rather than having a site-built approach tie up traffic for weeks.

“It required tons of pre-planning to move 45 tons of steel in 10 minutes,” said Linda Danielski, Boldt project manager. “We spent hours and hours in meetings between Boldt, the hospital, the city, and a nearby day care and it was amazing how all the planning paid off.”

Boldt project managers estimate costs were cut in half by prefabricating trusses versus building right on the job site and the overall production timeline was reduced by about 10%. Prefab building at ground level instead of 50 feet in the air also reduced the safety risk by almost 80%.

Daily planning sessions and extreme collaboration required teams to refine production schedules and ensure production costs kept pace with the budget. Boldt’s production process also managed the staging and timing of off-site prefabrication and on-site installation to compress the overall construction calendar. For healthcare, integrating preconstruction planning and prefabrication are the next generation of construction.

“There is opportunity to use prefab in the healthcare environment primarily where there’s a repeatable room or function such as exam rooms, hallways or patient rooms,” Stoffel said.

The connector project for Marshfield Hospital will be finished October 2022.

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SAN FRANCISCO—A supergroup of construction firms has formed to build a new hospital for the University of California, San Francisco. The trifecta of companies—Herrero Builders, Inc., The Boldt Company and Webcor—will be working together under the joint moniker Herrero Boldt Webcor on the university hospital project, to be located at the university’s Parnassus Heights campus.

The hospital project, which will be called the Hospital for the Future, is being designed jointly by architecture firms Herzog & de Meuron and HDR, and will utilize Lean project delivery principles to meet the project goals.

The healthcare project will be realized under an integrated form of agreement (IFOA), meaning that the designers, builders, owners and other vested parties will all sign onto a single integrated contract for the hospital project. Collectively, Herrero Boldt Webcor boasts nearly two dozen completed IFOA projects in Northern California’s healthcare sector over the course of the last decade.

In a recent statement, David Thomack, executive member for Herrero Boldt Webcor and group president for The Boldt Company, said that the supergroup of construction firms will make UCSF’s 21^st century healthcare mission a reality in the years to come.

“With the combined experience of building or renovating over 1.8 million square feet of advanced acute care hospital campuses in San Francisco over the last decade, we’re honored that UCSF has brought us on board to help lead their integrated team of designers and builders,” Thomack said. “Working in dense urban locations and marrying existing structures with new construction is the type of complex environment in which we excel.”

The Hospital of the Future will entail nearly one million square feet of new healthcare space and incorporate renovations of two existing buildings. The design phase is expected to be finished sometime in 2021, with construction projected to be completed in 2023.

The post UCSF Selects Building Firms for New Hospital appeared first on HCO News.

“This will complete the original master facility plan that the County Board approved in 2007 when we recognized the need to update medical center facilities,” said Mike Opat, chair of the Hennepin County Board and member of the health care system’s board of directors, in a statement. “The rest of the original plan, including replacing all of the intensive care units in the hospital and opening the Whittier Clinic, has been completed. Now it’s time to address the need for a new clinic and specialty center downtown.”

The plans were prompted by a recent study that suggested the current medical facilities would not be able to support the growing community by 2017. The newest buildings currently at the medical center were built in the 1970s. The aging buildings are also spread across nine different buildings. The new expansion will unify services to benefit both patients and medical staff.

“This will be a centerpiece of our downtown campus and, more importantly, enable us to provide quality care to our current and expanding patient base efficiently and effectively,” said Sharon Sayles Belton, chair of the Hennepin Healthcare System’s board of directors, in a statement. “HCMC has been a good neighbor, major employer, and community partner in the Elliot Park neighborhood for more than 40 years, and with this project, we will participate in the continued transformation of the east side of downtown Minneapolis.”

The new building will be in close proximity to the Wells Fargo office and residential development that will break ground in May and the new Vikings stadium that will open in 2016. The expansion is set to better accommodate the burgeoning downtown.

“Our hospital and clinic system today has all of the services and specialties to provide care to people who live and work downtown, but we lack the convenience of having that care centralized and accessible for people who need a quick visit to their doctor, with close parking and skyway access,” said Scott Wordelman, vice president of ambulatory care, in a statement. “Our specialty services in the new building will be convenient if you are coming from outside of downtown, and will feature the kind of care, access and amenities that will make it an exceptional experience for our patients. With the recent growth of our neighborhood clinic system in Minneapolis and suburban Hennepin County, we are seeing more patients come downtown for specialty care and this new facility will serve them well.”

The project is expected to debut in 2016.

The post Hennepin County Medical Center Announces Large-Scale Expansion appeared first on HCO News.

“This will complete the original master facility plan that the County Board approved in 2007 when we recognized the need to update medical center facilities,” said Mike Opat, chair of the Hennepin County Board and member of the health care system’s board of directors, in a statement. “The rest of the original plan, including replacing all of the intensive care units in the hospital and opening the Whittier Clinic, has been completed. Now it’s time to address the need for a new clinic and specialty center downtown.”

The plans were prompted by a recent study that suggested the current medical facilities would not be able to support the growing community by 2017. The newest buildings currently at the medical center were in built in the 1970s. The aging buildings are also spread across nine different buildings. The new expansion will unify services to benefit both patients and medical staff.

“This will be a centerpiece of our downtown campus and, more importantly, enable us to provide quality care to our current and expanding patient base efficiently and effectively,” said Sharon Sayles Belton, chair of the Hennepin Healthcare System’s board of directors, in a statement. “HCMC has been a good neighbor, major employer, and community partner in the Elliot Park neighborhood for more than 40 years and with this project we will participate in the continued transformation of the east side of downtown Minneapolis.”

The new building will be in close proximity to the Wells Fargo office and residential development that will break ground in May and the new Vikings stadium that will open in 2016. The expansion is set to better accommodate the burgeoning downtown.

“Our hospital and clinic system today has all of the services and specialties to provide care to people who live and work downtown, but we lack the convenience of having that care centralized and accessible for people who need a quick visit to their doctor, with close parking and skyway access,” said Scott Wordelman, vice president of ambulatory care, in a statement. “Our specialty services in the new building will be convenient if you are coming from outside of downtown, and will feature the kind of care, access, and amenities that will make it an exceptional experience for our patients. With the recent growth of our neighborhood clinic system in Minneapolis and suburban Hennepin County, we are seeing more patients come downtown for specialty care and this new facility will serve them well.”

The project is expected to open in 2016.

The post Hennepin County Medical Center Announces Expansion Plans appeared first on HCO News.