Healthcare Design - September 2013 - 50

On-site design challenges

workstations with color-coded soffits help
identify staff areas on the upper floors.
Custom desks in the exam rooms were
designed to promote face-to-face interaction
between patients and the staff. The desk-
affectionately called the "shark fin"-and a
wall-mounted monitor are strategically placed
to ensure eye contact while staff gathers
patient medical information.
To further attract patients, UHS decided to
expand its women's services into the Vestal
Women's Center on the third floor, offering a
range of services, from gynecology to mammography suites, in one location.
Measuring success
UHS Vestal opened its door a little over a
year ago, and already its results are exceeding expectations. In a release, Joe Cerra,
senior vice president of Physician Practice
Management at UHS, says the Vestal walk-in
center is busier than any of the system's
50

www.healthcaredesignmagazine.com 09.13

other centers, surpassing volume projections
by 41 percent in 2012.
The location is also attracting new patients, too, including from nearby Binghamton
University. The school's students made up 20
percent of the walk-in traffic during the facility's
first four months of operation.
UHS is also using the $30 million project to
kick-start a building refresh by taking elements
of the Vestal building's interior design into
existing properties and new facilities.
"It's a very competitive environment out
there, and hospitals and systems are consolidating and acquiring one another," Prentice
says. "So they need to do whatever they can

Designers chose floorby-floor check-in to make
the patient experience as
simple and straightforward
as possible. Centralized
reception and waiting
areas are housed on each
floor.

to differentiate themselves and to be more
user-friendly and more welcoming, and reduce
waiting time." HCD
Anne DiNardo is senior editor of Healthcare
Design. She can be reached at adinardo@
vendomegrp.com.

A more in-depth look at this topic and the
UHS Vestal project will be shared at the
Healthcare Design Conference, (Nov. 16-19,
Orlando) in the session "Big Box Integrated
Outpatient Centers-Planning, Programming
and Implementation." For
more information, visit www.
healthcaredesignmagazine.
com/conference.

COURTESY OF UHS

As healthcare moves to more off-campus
outpatient centers, designers and owners are
faced with a number of inherent challenges.
Sometimes the biggest obstacle is the
location itself. When NexCore got involved
in United Health Services' Vestal project, the
owner was already in the bidding process on a
4.7-acre site. NexCore assisted the UHS team
in conducting a site analysis and determined
it was not large enough for all the outpatient
services and necessary surface parking, and
thus suggested relocating the project to an
adjacent 6.8-acre site.
"That was important, so there could be
space for internal growth within the building
and capacity for ample parking," says Kim
Prentice, architect, managing director of development and operations, NexCore Group.
Creating a visible presence is also key.
Many centers are located in retail corridors,
where consumers are familiar with shopping
for groceries or a new TV, but not necessarily
for healthcare services.
Prentice says that for the Vestal project,
careful attention was given to studying the
street presence of the building's main entry
from the retail corridor. Much of the existing
vegetation near the building was cleared to
increase visibility, and two monument signs
were located along two major access roads
entering the site.
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Healthcare Design - September 2013

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