Healthcare Design - March 2016 - 45

KIERAN REYNOLDS

Need for speed

of build-out drawings to see if we could reuse that
material. There were 600 door frames we were able
to reuse," Robison says.
Additionally, completed spaces didn't necessarily
meet Grandview's acute care requirements since
the site was originally built as a specialty facility.
"We had to do a lot of things to retrofit to make
them serviceable for a full-service hospital, whether
it was oxygen tank storage or larger pharmacy
distribution rooms-all of the full-service hospital
capabilities and the infrastructure for the type and
number of patients we were going to have on those
floors," Mason says. "We had to basically blow up
several of those cores and redesign the shape of
how those support services would help those existing patient rooms on each floor."
The existing structure overall, though, aligned
well with Grandview's expectations, with, for
example, the ORs and ICUs largely being in the
proper locations. The OR was expanded, though,
to bring 30 on line-an easier task on one of the
building's four floors that are three acres each. "We
took some of that original footprint but increased
the size and scale pretty dramatically and also

increased the size of the support services on that
floor in terms of prep and recovery and PACU,"
Mason says. Grandview also wanted its 72 ICU
beds largely centralized on one floor to benefit
from shared resources, but adding in those
spaces meant siting them along the building's
front curvature, a tighter fit than the OR project.
And long before the construction ever started,
all those existing systems that made the building so attractive, from mechanical to electrical
to medical gasses, were retro-commissioned
over the course of seven months, with everything
serviced and parts replaced, allowing all of it to
be saved.
Built to last
Opening in October 2015, the 372-bed Grandview
Medical Center, including its 930,000-square-foot
hospital, 1 million-square-foot parking garage,
and 220,000-square-foot professional office
building, came in at a price tag of $280 million and
several months ahead of schedule.
Not only was the program fit into the building,
but opportunities for expansion-even on its just

The new Grandview Medical Center presented a complex project combined with
the challenge that most face these days:
an ownership request for the quickest
construction schedule possible.
To answer that request, general
contractor Brasfield & Gorrie started
by breaking down the project scope
into multiple jobs awarded to multiple
subcontractors. The 930,000-square-foot
hospital was one job and the 1 millionsquare-foot parking garage was another;
the professional office building shell and
its build-out were separate projects; and
site work and roadway improvements
were also bid out separately. Ultimately,
135 subcontracting companies were hired
to finish the work.
That number also inspired the team to
find a way to easily communicate between
one another and architect ESa. First, WiFi
was installed across the 13.4-acre site to
support access to documents. All subcontractor foremen and superintendents were
required to carry iPads, where BIM models
and 8,000 sheets of drawings could be
easily and instantly accessed. "The day
we'd get them from the architect, they
were on everybody's laptop or iPad within
24 hours," says Robert Robison, senior
project manager with Brasfield & Gorrie.
The team also partnered with Auburn
University to fly a drone around the
building to assess its existing conditions,
inside and out. "They could fly that drone
up to the glass and inspect the caulk joint
between the panels of glass," Robison
says. "That was able to give us a lot of
information that we could use in our BIM
modeling."
Other solutions included the Lean
method of "last planner" for scheduling,
where each subcontractor was charged
with thinking through their scope of work
and having foremen and superintendents
meet daily to determine what was happening that day, who might be in someone's
way of accomplishing that task, and how
to speed things up to get the work done.
Even a simple solution paid off, with
all site materials stored on carts instead
of on the ground so that when they were
needed, it was a matter of wheeling them
away rather than having to pick them up
and move them.
In the end, with the public promised an
open by the second quarter of 2016, the
effort paid off with doors opening on Oct.
10, 2015.

HCDmagazine.com 03.16

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Healthcare Design - March 2016

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