Healthcare Design - November 2015 - 52

Left: Post-anesthesia
recovery rooms in the
outpatient surgery center are
private yet open so nurses
can keep a close watch
over patients and their vital
signs. Below: To maximize
space within the ORs, Akron
Children's reduced the
amount of built-in storage
and is using a cart system
to store and transport
equipment and supplies.

More to come
The resulting facility houses a 75-private-bed NICU;
a 20-room ED with 11 fast-track rooms, five behavioral health rooms, a radiology suite, and a three-bed
trauma suite; an outpatient surgery with four ORs,
eight private pre-op rooms, and 18 recovery rooms;
and a two-bed, high-risk labor and delivery department with one critical care room and two connected
ORs-just as planned. But it's built to respond to just
about anything Akron Children's wants to throw at it.
The Kay Jewelers Pavilion, the first phase of a 25year master plan, is built for flexibility, too-a goal that
drove decisions right from the beginning. For example,
Wakulchik says a suggestion was made early on that
the NICU rooms didn't require private bathrooms and
they should be cut for a potential savings of $2 million.
"If I eliminated bathrooms on two floors of this building, then I have two floors that would be of little use
to me if I needed those later on as a post-anesthesia
care unit or regular patient rooms," she says.
To answer that need to adapt, NICU rooms are all
standardized and immediately adaptable for a new
use. The ED rooms are also consistently sized as opposed to fluctuating square footage based on acuity.
Further, the team opted to build as little casework as
possible, relying on a heavy use of carts on wheels
to reduce the number of renovations that might be
required later.
"Considerations that drove the project included
how a program might grow within the building and
how we would accommodate that, as well as how the
campus will ultimately grow. We had to make sure we
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didn't make decisions that were really good for solving
the immediate problem but created more problems as
the master plan was executed," Lichtig says.
Of the building's total square footage, 261,300
square feet are occupied and another 95,800 remain
undeveloped. But some of that space won't be empty
for long. Akron Children's is currently adding a dental
program with eight operatories and space for two
more, an additional 25 beds that can be used for NICU
or traditional patient rooms, a field treatment center
with two ultrasound rooms, and a kitchen expansion.
And the success of all of it is a direct result of those
early planning sessions, close collaboration, and plenty
of thought put into exactly how the building would
work-and grow. "You can run a project and just use
Lean. You can run a project and just use IPD ... but
what you see, the deliverables and the value that we
gleaned from this project, was in combining both of
those," Wakulchik says. HCD
Jennifer Kovacs Silvis is executive editor of Healthcare Design. She can be reached at jennifer.silvis@
emeraldexpo.com.

BLAKE MARVIN/HKS INC.

one in between who pitched in. "Typically, contractors
would be looking for a change order in a traditional
project delivery environment. In this situation, it was
every possible trade discipline you could imagine
jumping in and trying to make it right."

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Healthcare Design - November 2015

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