SUN PRAIRIE, Wis.—On June 4, SSM Health celebrated a ceremonial groundbreaking for its new outpatient center in Sun Prairie. The approximately 90,000-square-foot facility will allow the health care provider to better meet the needs of the growing Madison metro.

“Sun Prairie is a thriving city that attracts people from a number of surrounding communities. We are invested in growing with it,” says Sue Anderson, Regional President of SSM Health in Wisconsin. “This new outpatient center will alleviate some of the growing constraints we face at our SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital – Madison campus and allow us to open access for more timely care when and where our patients need it.”

The project is more than just a new building, it is a long-standing commitment to Sun Prairie and the surrounding communities, bringing additional health care access, as well as stable and secure employment to the area.

“This is a great day for Sun Prairie. What you are undertaking today will benefit our community for years to come.  We appreciate the confidence you have in our community as demonstrated by this new facility,” said Paul Esser, Mayor of the City of Sun Prairie. “Thank you for choosing Sun Prairie for this expansion.”

While the core vision of the Sun Prairie Outpatient Center is to expand convenient access to key surgical and eye care services for patients, the project also puts sustainability at the forefront. Architectural partners Kahler Slater include leading edge environmentally focused features, while also honoring the legacy of the site.

“Kahler Slater partnered with SSM Health to design a building with future resilience, a focus on staff wellbeing and patient experience leveraging WELL principles and an operationally efficient care team model,” says Melinda Pogwizd, AIA, Kahler Slater Project Designer. “The project site includes a robust solar array, a half-mile walking path and 100+ year old legacy trees were maintained in the planning. We are proud to work with a client that has invested wholeheartedly in exceptional patient care and has sustainability top of mind.”

Long-time construction partners J.H. Findorff & Son, Inc., were selected as the project’s contractor. The new facility will build upon the success SSM Health and Findorff have seen on past projects like the SSM Health South Madison Campus project.

“We’re honored to continue our long-standing relationship with SSM Health on this exciting new project. Many of our team, including myself, are proud to call Sun Prairie home and look forward to enhancing our community and building a new resource for the people who need it,” notes Jeff Tubbs, Executive Vice President at J.H. Findorff & Son, Inc.

Opening in 2025, the Sun Prairie Outpatient Center will offer surgical orthopedics care, as well as comprehensive eye care services.

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APPLETON, Wis.—Hammes, a national leader in healthcare development, just celebrated the opening of the new Children’s Wisconsin Appleton Clinic in Appleton, which opened to patients on March 6.

The new two-story, 54,000-square-foot location allows Children’s Wisconsin to expand existing pediatric services and provide new specialties to families in Northeast and Central Wisconsin. The clinic will offer more than 20 specialty care services, including asthma/allergy, audiology, cardiology, imaging, lab, physical and occupational therapy, and speech therapy.

“We are proud to bring this new medical office building to life on behalf of Children’s Wisconsin to support their goal of bringing specialized pediatric care closer to families,” said Todd Kibler, Managing Principal of Hammes Partners.

Hammes will retain ownership of the new clinic and provide property management services, as it does for the Children’s Wisconsin Kenosha Clinic in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Miron Construction Co, Inc. was the construction manager, and Kahler Slater was the project architect.

Founded in 1991, Hammes is a vertically integrated real estate solutions platform specializing in healthcare real estate strategy and planning, project management, development, investment, and property management.

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APPLETON Wis.—Hammes, a leader in healthcare development, will break ground on the new Children’s Wisconsin medical office building in Appleton this month. Children’s Wisconsin selected Hammes as its development partner to manage all facets of the clinic’s development including project management and property management. Hammes will retain ownership of the new two-story, 54,000-square-foot facility upon its completion in 2023.

Hammes also served as the developer for and retains ownership of the Children’s Wisconsin Kenosha Clinic, which opened to patients in early 2019.

The new Children’s Wisconsin clinic in Appleton will provide comprehensive outpatient pediatric services from a single, convenient location. The building will offer a cheerful and comfortable atmosphere for patients and families and has the ability to expand in the future.

“We’re proud to continue our partnership with Children’s Wisconsin in supporting their mission to provide specialized pediatric care from a convenient outpatient location in the Fox Valley region,” said Todd Kibler, principal of Hammes Partners.

The project team includes Miron Construction Co, Inc. as the construction manager and Kahler Slater as the architect.

Founded in 1991, Hammes is a vertically integrated real estate solutions platform specializing in healthcare real estate strategy and planning, project management, development, investment and property management.

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SPRINGFIELD, Ill.—Kahler Slater, an architecture, strategic advisory, interior design, and environmental branding firm, joins Hospital Sisters Health System (HSHS) in unveiling the opening of its expanded, family-centered Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at HSHS St. John’s Children’s Hospital in Springfield.

With the nationwide trend of increasing premature births, HSHS St. John’s Children’s Hospital needed to make drastic changes to their existing 45-bed, 15,000-square-foot Level III NICU. At the outset, project leaders knew they wanted to build upon the latest evidence-based design learnings from other best-in-class facilities. The design team and clinicians visited multiple benchmark facilities for NICU care in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. They were able to collaborate with staff and leadership to get a sense for lessons learned and best practices to bring forward.

Led by Dr. Beau Batton, Chief Neonatologist at HSHS St. John’s, the clinical design team along with Kahler Slater and women and children’s healthcare experts, Smith Hager Bajo, targeted multiple patient outcomes that could be improved with the new environment, including average length of stay and rate of readmission, among others. The team will be gathering post-occupancy data to determine the success of the desired outcomes.

Phase I of the expanded NICU is more than double the original size at 36,500 square feet, with a total of 56 beds. Innovative features of the expanded program include:

• Single family rooms where parents can stay overnight with their infant.
• Dedicated rooms for NICU twins and their families to stay together.
• A tiny baby sub-unit dedicated to the highly specialized needs of the smallest patients.
• A milk lab where milk technicians can fortify mothers’ breastmilk with additional nutrients.
• A dedicated family respite lounge and overnight sleep suites will be available when Phase II opens later this year.

With the new units up and running, St. John’s will have the unique offering of couplet care. This care strategy was first introduced in Sweden at the Karolinska Institute in 2007 and there are only ten states in the nation offering this innovative program. It allows mom and their NICU baby to stay in the same room, establishing the essential parent-child bond from the outset. Positive outcomes as a result of couplet care have proven to be decreases in length-of-stay and infant morbidity. Couplet care also supports earlier bonding of NICU infant and mother due to earlier skin-to-skin contact and increased breastfeeding success.

As a family-centered environment, care was taken to make sure the design aesthetic of the space was appealing to the entire family. Thoughtful attention was given to light-filled care spaces and corridors. The clean and bright interior was then accented with simple shapes, pops of bold color and botanical graphics. These elements support wayfinding and help emphasize the smaller ‘neighborhoods’ throughout the floor. The overall palette maintains a consistent aesthetic with the standards established with the larger HSHS St. John’s Children’s Hospital, as well as the new HSHS St. John’s Women’s and Children’s Clinic (also designed by Kahler Slater) across the street.

St. Johns has a 78-year history of caring for premature and critically ill infants. As the only Level III NICU in the Illinois area, the hospital cares for about 700 babies annually from a 39-county area.

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ST. THOMAS, Ontario, Canada — The St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital (STEGH) celebrated its grand opening earlier this year for what’s being dubbed by the project team as the “Great Expansion.” The addition includes a completely new emergency room, surgery and central processing departments and a new 17-bed Mental Health unit in a design created to help with efficiency and wayfinding.

Milwaukee-based Kahler Slater partnered with the Toronto architectural firm Montgomery-Sisam on this Ministry of Health–approved Redevelopment Project, breaking ground on the $98 million expansion in 2015. The project was financed by raised funds including $16 million, comprised of 10 percent of construction costs and 100 percent of the cost of the new equipment. The county of Elgin and city of St. Thomas paid $3.5 million each with the rest made by community donors.

The lustrous design holds new, state-of-the-art equipment and provides two separate entryways including the “front of the house” entrance for patients accessing emergency, surgical and outpatient services, and another back entrance for arriving ambulances. The expansion also includes the conversion of the basement into a sterile processing unit and wider hallways.

According to a statement from Kahler Slater, an emphasis was placed on bolstering both patient experience and staff efficiencies by improving adjacencies and lessening footsteps. Kahler Slater’s team led staff through a process to develop a functional and clinical design for the project while concentrating on merging the addition with the existing facility to improve wayfinding for public and staff flows.

The project’s two key goals were to ensure healthcare providers spend 80 percent of their time caring for patients and that every patient entering the emergency department requiring admittance could be checked in within 60 minutes.

Before the expansion, the facility was designed to hold roughly 20,000 patients while the number of patients reached up to 52,000. The emergency department, located on the ground floor, is now geared toward high-volume patient accommodations and lowering wait times, with rooms designed under a regulatory method to reduce the chance of errors.

Prior to the expansion, the hospital also had issues with their paging system caused by temporary connectivity issues. Now, STEGH replaced its operating paging system with Vocera Voice and integrated Vocera with other technologies at the hospital, including the Medworxx Bed Board bed optimization system (BOS). The BOS provides a data repository and graphical representation of all the beds in a hospital unit and the status of those beds. Consequently, this has helped improve bed turnover rates and decreased the length of patient stays.

A statement from Kahler Slater explained that the recent advancement capitalizes on current operational improvement work that reduces emergency wait times and improved workflow. By implementing a “front of house” entrance design for patients arriving, they separate the experience from the emergency vehicle entrance, which was previously joined. The design with the back- and front-of-house spaces help ensure patient dignity, privacy and comfort within the facility.

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O’FALLON, Ill. — A member of Hospital Sisters Health Systems (HSHS), St. Elizabeth’s Hospital welcomed patients, staff and visitors to its new health and wellness destination in November 2017, with the hospital presently gaining the label as the most technologically advanced medical center in the region. The facility replaces its previous location with a mission to improve services the entirety of the Southwestern Illinois region.

The new 350,000-square-foot hospital’s patient-centered design offers greater space, superior efficiencies and modern aesthetics, using metal ceiling panels to help create the building’s four exterior canopies.

Alberici-Holland, a joint venture of Alberici Corporation of St. Louis and Holland Construction Services of Swansea, Ill., served as the project’s general contractor. Von Alst Operating of Swansea, Ill., later joined the project team in November 2015, bringing its proficiency in specialty metal ceiling systems. Kahler Slater also specified its use of Rockfon Planar Macroplus linear metal ceiling panels with a Metalwood II Bamboo color finish. The finished metal ceiling panels were installed in the exterior canopies on the emergency department, inpatient and departure areas. Also used on the fifth floor, the exterior canopy’s metal ceiling seems to transcend the exterior glass wall with a visually uninterrupted transition to the interior chapel and physical therapy room.

The design provides clinical excellence, quality patient care, as well as Lean-efficient operations while reflecting St. Elizabeth’s 142-year history and faith-based mission.

“We wanted to create a warm, inviting environment throughout St. Elizabeth’s Hospital,” said Dave Sheedy, project leader and principal at Kahler Slater, in a statement. “For the hospital canopies, we wanted the look of wood, but it’s difficult to get natural wood approved as a material that meets the life/safety requirements. Metal is more appropriate for the outdoor environment and noncombustible.”

Sheedy added that Rockfon’s metal panels hold a clipping mechanism that helped meet the hospitals’ Seismic Design Category D requirements. The installed panels then deliver access to the sprinklers, lighting, cameras and the other components integrated within the ceiling and concealed by it.

Substantial construction completion of the hospital was marked in October 2017 while maintaining its budget, with a mission to provide region-leading, top-quality health care. Moreover, the aesthetics of the design ultimately delivers the healing environment they envisioned for their patients.

“Design goals from the start included addressing wellness, systems and integration, and patient and staff experience throughout the facility. We additionally challenged the team to incorporate themes around our patron saint, Saint Elizabeth, and her history of serving the sick and the poor,” said Susan Holloway, RN, BSN, director of construction management for HSHS St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.

The new St. Elizabeth’s hospital also offers an emergency department, state-of-the-art operating rooms, an advanced intensive care unit and inpatient rehabilitation. Further inpatient and outpatient services at the new facility include cancer care, modern birthing suites, telehealth consultations featuring accredited stroke care and award-winning heart care.

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