Atlanta-based Heery International, program manager for the new project, broke ground in mid-July. Dennis LaGatta, Heery’s project executive overseeing the work, said there would be three components to the construction process. First, the facility’s central plant is set to be replaced, then a new addition will replace the emergency and operating departments, and at the same time, the hospital’s nine-story patient tower will be revamped to give the 1950s exterior a more modern look.

“We anticipate that the central plant will be operational in November 2015, and that has to be done first so that we can connect to the new OR-emergency department expansion in December of 2015 to allow the completion and opening of the OR/ED in the winter of 2015,” LaGatta said.

The new central plant will serve as the hospital’s connection point for vital building services, so it’s important for it to be operational first. It also houses the hospital’s back-up generator system.

“The next phase would be, once we have the operating room and ED up and running, that we’ll go back and reconnect the rest of the existing hospital to the new central plant for the purposes of upgrading their emergency power system. Running concurrently will be the re-cladding of the [patient tower],” LaGatta added.

The transformed patient tower will be the most visible element of the process with a glass curtain wall and metal panel system. The prominent tower can be seen from Broward County’s Interstate 95, and it overlooks the hospital’s 35-acre campus.

Inside the hospital, the newly expanded 53,000-square-foot operating suite and emergency department will allow the hospital to continue as the only Level II trauma center in the north end of the county. The ER has 53 treatment spaces, and each treatment space is identical in room orientation and available medical equipment. A decentralized nursing station model allows for flexible treatment space utilization during peak and non-peak event time frames. The operating department will feature six new class-C operating rooms.

When Broward Health hired Heery, the hospital system asked the program manager to use an integrated project delivery-lite (IPD-lite) approach. The traditional IPD delivery method creates a single team of project participants that are uniformly responsible for completion. IPD-lite uses some elements of traditional IPD, but there are still incentives to collaborate.

Heery then reached out to Dallas-based HKS Architects and Chicago-based Perkins + Will as well as Skanska USA Building in Parsippany, N.J., as the construction manager at-risk, to create a four-company team throughout the planning, design and construction phases.

“Our IPD-lite approach allowed our team to focus on meeting Broward Health’s needs in the most cost-effective and time-efficient way possible,” LaGatta said in a press statement. “The creative thought process yielded innovations in our approach to the program as a whole and substantially reduced the construction schedule timeline, which means these new facilities will be operational and supporting the hospital conservatively 12 months earlier than initially projected.”

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