GILBERT, Ariz.—McCarthy Building Companies recently broke ground on the $243 million, 351,000-square-foot Banner Gateway Medical Center Tower and Emergency Department expansion and renovation project, located at 1900 N. Higley Road in Gilbert. The expansion essentially doubles the size of the medical center campus, addressing growing needs for women’s services and cancer care by bringing an additional patient tower, an expanded diagnostics and treatment area, and more parking.

The planned expansion includes adding a second five-story patient tower. The new tower is a 208,500-square-foot addition that will bring 109 new patient beds to the facility initially, and provides the ability to increase the capacity of patient beds by an additional 72 to 358 total beds once the shelled space is built out to serve the rapidly growing East Valley. The project also includes a three-level, 85,000-square-foot expansion to the Diagnostics and Treatment building on the west side of campus, including an expansion to the Emergency Department, as well as a two-level expansion to the existing Diagnostics and Treatment building on the east side of campus.

The expansion addresses the capacity need for women and infant care, including labor, delivery, postpartum and a new neonatal intensive care unit for babies who need extra care. In addition to women’s services, the expansion includes added space for inpatient cancer care by Banner MD Anderson Cancer Center, more space for surgical, emergency, endoscopy and imaging services, as well as shelled space for future growth.

In addition, the Banner Gateway Medical Center renovation and expansion will include the construction of two new surface parking lots, adding approximately 690 new parking spaces for visitor and staff use, as well as upgrades to the existing Central Utility Plant. Approximately 40,000 square feet of additional renovation work is also planned within the existing medical center during the final phase of the project.

“We continue to experience rapid and significant growth in families choosing to deliver babies at Banner Gateway, as well as the growth in demand for our expert care of cancer patients,” said Lamont Yoder, CEO of Banner Gateway Medical Center. “This demand presents the need to increase our Women and Infant Services and Oncology departments and other spaces dedicated to supporting these patients while continuing to serve the broad health care needs of our community.”

Construction on the tower expansion began in February 2021 and will complete in first quarter of 2023 on an accelerated schedule with the campus renovation work and parking lot additions completing in 2024. Banner expects to add more than 600 new jobs once the facility is opened.

The project is being managed using the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) structure with the owner, design team, general contractor and trade partners all co-locating in a virtual “big room” allowing for the project’s design and construction strategies to be developed and enhanced through a robust system of collaboration, solution innovations and coordination strategies being brought to the project to ensure operational excellence and end-user efficiency.

“Virtually co-locating our entire project team brings every stakeholder together from very early in the process to collaborate in a solution-oriented environment where benefits to the project go far beyond cost-savings and actually allow us to deliver a better facility to the end-user,” said Kurt Radke, project director for McCarthy Building Companies who is overseeing the Banner Gateway tower expansion project. “All of the new buildings at Banner Gateway tie into existing buildings, so the site will be very active and effective planning will be paramount to minimize disruptions to this operational hospital campus, while adhering to the accelerated schedule.”

Some of the innovative cost- and time-saving measures on the Banner Gateway project include:
Prefabrication of the exterior skin; Project delivery completed in five separate design packages, allowing construction to start prior to design-phase completing;
Construction of all three building expansions occurring simultaneously.

As part of the IPD process, all the major building trade partners were contracted early in design to aid in target value design, constructability and Building Information Modeling (BIM) coordination prior to permit. This has proven to save on costs and ensures that the construction team is able to proceed with system fabrication earlier on in the project.

The architect on the project is SmithGroup with civil engineering led by Dibble Engineering and structural engineering led by PK Associates. Field Verified is serving as an exterior skin consultant. Major trade partners include AmFab Steel, MKB, AROK, Buesing Excavation, Delta Electric, Foothills Fire, KT Fab, Otis Elevators, Stafford Crane, SwissLog, TD Industries and Walters & Wolf.

McCarthy Building Companies completed the initial Banner Gateway Medical Center campus in only 20 months in 2007.

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