FORT MYERS, Fla.—Stevens Construction’s special projects division has completed SWFL Children’s Charities Eye Institute of Golisano Children’s Hospital, announced Dan Adams, company vice president, south Florida.

Located at 11390 Summerlin Square Drive in Fort Myers, the 5,700-square-foot SWFL Children’s Charities Eye Institute is the largest pediatric ophthalmology office serving Lee County and includes a lobby, 14 exam rooms, offices and nurse stations appointed with colorful finishes. Stevens Construction provided an interior demolition and a complete renovation of the existing building into the new pediatric practice, which is now open.

The Stevens Construction special projects team included Joe Cimilluca, Norma Cimilluca, Mark Pelafas and Shane Sindledecker. Burt Hill/Pollock Krieg Architects was the architect of record.

Stevens Construction launched a special projects division in 2018 to serve projects ranging from $500,000 and under. Special projects include tenant improvements, additions, renovations, repairs and specialty projects.

With offices in Fort Myers, Sarasota, Tampa and Orlando, Fla., Stevens Construction specializes in providing construction management, general contracting and consulting services to clients and design professionals. Other services include site and design team selection, budgeting, project scheduling, permitting, cost and quality control and warranty service.

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The design team for the project included Ballinger Architects, headquartered in Philadelphia, and Denver-based ArtHouse Design. The project had a budget of $45 million and was made possible with the support of thousands of donations. The project began shortly after the building’s dedication in 2015.

The new floors at the children’s hospital bring several significant advancements to the facility. The areas on the new floors were opened progressively to the public over the course of August and include six new pediatric operating rooms in the William and Mildred Levine Pediatric Surgical Suite, the addition of which puts the hospital on the same level as children’s hospitals in many of the country’s largest cities, and far surpassing other children’s hospitals in the region.

Additionally, the new floors include the Clay E. and Rita M. Buzzard Pediatric Cardiac Cath Lab Suite and a gastroenterology surgical procedure suite. There are 23 new private pre-op and post-op recovery rooms as well as the relocation of the current 12 ICU and 10 general care pediatric beds to the new tower. There was also an addition of six new pediatric ICU beds to meet rising demand.

The influence of ArtHouse Design brings vibrant environmental graphics, images and icons to the new floors — as well as to the rest of the hospital — to make the hospital as warm, welcoming and comfortable to children as possible.

Each level of Golisano Children’s Hospital features color and graphics related to Lake, Meadow, Glenn, Garden, Park and City, as related to the geography of upstate New York. The graphics on each level are intended to help adults as well as children navigate the hospital with a distinct sense of place for each level.

Other unique design elements of the new floors include custom-designed, backlit nurses’ station desks with warm and inviting white cubes; back-lit, floor-to-ceiling graphics and photographic murals; interactive, kinetic games embedded in the walls for children to interact and play with; vibrantly colored, five-foot-diameter graphic icons that identify the level in elevator lobbies; glass walls with patterns that feature grass, flowers and water patterns; and playful wall graphics inside each of the exam and treatment rooms.

Fundraising for Phase II construction is still underway and has been supported by numerous gifts. These gifts include $2 million from Rita Buzzard in honor of her late husband, Clay, and a $750,000 pledge from Andy McDermott and Rob Burch, creators of the Fairport Music Festival.

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ROCHESTER, N.Y. — The University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) has partnered with Schneider Electric, an international company headquartered in France, to deploy “Asset Performance Services” (APS) on its medical school in Rochester. APS is intended to help the facilities management team to manage the performance of and offer insights to the status of the facility’s electrical distribution equipment. The positive results and success from APS are the first step in what is now a long-term goal for URMC to apply this monitoring system to more of its campus facilities.

URMC sees 140,000 inpatients each year, and one million outpatients annually. The facilities management team is responsible for managing 5 million square feet of footprint across the medical center’s campus, and has over 26,000 pieces of medical equipment to keep up with. Additionally, the facility has shifted to an entirely electronic data filing system and electronic medical records system over the years. All of these factors combined add up to a high power demand for the facility.

All of this and more led URMC seek the development of a completely digital and intelligent campus. “Even though emergency power generators are in place, the core electrical systems have to be reliable,” said Mark Schwartz, director of facility operations at URMC. “When power goes out at this institution, even though we have emergency backup, it still makes people very nervous. It impacts surgeries and other cases that we may have going on,” said Schwartz. The first step to mitigating this issue for the medical center was the implementation of this monitoring system through Schneider Electric in April 2015.

The architecture-based campus-wide monitoring solution applied by Schneider to URMC is called an “EcoStruxure Asset Advisor.” This solution works by connecting and monitoring the medical center’s electrical distribution assets via the Cloud. Event notifications keep facility staff up to date regarding electrical distribution system performance. When abnormalities in the system occur, recommendations are made to the staff with the proper steps to take in order to avoid and prevent system failures. This innovative digital approach overall monitors the heartbeat of the institution, cuts down on maintenance costs, improves power system reliability and relieves overburdened staff.

Since deployment of the EcoStruxture in 2015, this solution has produced a 20 to one return on investment for the medical center, according to Schwartz. Schneider’s EcoStruxture enables the facilities team to be able to anticipate potential problems and better manage the monitoring of the high volume of equipment, which was previously impossible to keep up with. “In two incidences alone, we saved hundreds of thousands of dollars through early discovery of the problems,” said Schwartz.

With the current success of the initial pilot program of the APS system on URMC as a baseline foundation, plans are currently underway to establish a facility-wide energy management and power quality system, starting with the Golisano Children’s Hospital. Pending budget approval by University of Rochester management, the EcoStruxure Asset Advisor monitoring system is slated for installation at the Golisano Children’s Hospital before the end of 2017.

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