In today’s healthcare landscape, organizations face a wide range of challenges that directly impact day-to-day operations, including limited bed capacity, staff burn out, constraints on capital dollars, and the need for flexible patient care environments that relieve pressure on bed demand. The resulting immediate space needs, along with the innovations in prefabrication and advancements in the construction community, have made modular products an increasingly attractive option to address these challenges.
The recent pandemic served as a catalyst for innovation as speed became critical to providing patient care space. Seeing the low-quality environments being set up as emergency measures, HGA designed a high-quality, fully modular, prefabricated critical care environment that had the design flexibility to adhere to airborne infection isolation room requirements, enabling healthcare institutions to meet the needs of their patients and improve staff safety.
After implementing these solutions at multiple sites across the country, we learned that this modular environment provides the required functionality, and can also seamlessly blend with—or sometimes enhance—existing campuses, offering a cohesive and upgraded healthcare setting that has a long life to continue to support and add bed capacity.
Modular is Design and Construction Innovation
The design process of modular patient units more closely resembles that of purchasing a car rather than following a traditional design process. Like cars, there is a kit of standardized parts assembled according to a set of predefined rules, ensuring both construction and design quality while increasing reliability of the final product.
By leveraging similar prototype features, the fully modular patient care environment is designed to flex to support various acuity levels and specialties, with the ability to take on owner-specific operational requirements.
Key features of this design strategy include:
- Best Practice Standardization of Components: The design of the unit is research-based and adheres to industry best practices, resulting in best-in-class clinical care environments focused on the patient and staff wellbeing.
- Flexibility and Scale: The modular nature of the unit’s components makes it easily scalable, enabling seamless expansion of existing facilities or the creation of standalone solutions. Flexibility created through universal design ensures adaptability to acuity and evolving clinical needs.
- Design for Manufacturing: A strategic approach to design for manufacturing is employed, aiming to enhance quality, maximize standardization, mitigate construction risks, ensure budget certainty, reduce risks of labor shortages, and support diversity and sustainability initiatives. This strategy significantly reduces the construction schedule, positively impacting speed-to-market opportunities.
Quality
Collaboration during design between planning, architecture, interiors, and research teams allows the prototypical modular design to increase the quality of the overall solution. Evidence-based design criteria centered around patient and staff safety, staff efficiency, the wellbeing of both patients and staff, serving as the foundation to ground the design in clinical best practice, standardization, and efficiency. As the prototype units are developed, evidence-based researchers continue their engagement with the design/build team to review drawings and built units to continuously refine the design.
The result is a patient unit that has the same level of quality found within a traditionally constructed healthcare facility.
One barrier to prefabrication has been the fear that the aesthetic quality of the design is sub-par to the rest of the campus. Through a iterative design process and continual improvement, the prototype now has the ability to seamlessly integrate as either a customized or plug-and-play solution, aligned with existing brand standards and campus architectural styles.
Speed
The strongest driver for healthcare organizations to implement a fully modular prefabricated solution is speed to market. Because the unit is based on an evidence-based prototype that adapts to operational needs, the intensive design process is minimized or eliminated, and the time from project conception to first patient is drastically shortened, in some cases completing a project in 1/3 the amount of time as traditional delivery. This allows health organizations to focus time on operational detail and efficiently.
Using the prototype, modular units are built in fabrication facilities while on-site work like site preparation and foundation installation progresses in tandem. As fully finished units arrive on site, they are installed. This parallel construction process significantly reduces costs over traditional construction by saving time and eliminating the need for managing a full-scale construction site.
Safety and Skilled Labor
Fabrication facilities are strategically located in areas with access to skilled construction labor, combatting the shortages found in some geographies. The manufacturing strategies used in constructing modular patient units also provides a safe environment to teach construction techniques to a new generation of diverse workers, creating a system of continuity of valuable skills in the industry.
Value
Prototype solutions offer significant benefits to healthcare systems and clinical operations through their highly repeatable and flexible nature, and the creation of easily maintainable facilities. By implementing standardized systems and materials throughout multiple locations, operational and maintenance requirements are standardized and more efficient, typically with a smaller, agile workforce.
The impact of this strategy is exemplified in Grafton, Wisconsin. Collaborating with Advocate Aurora Health and Boldt, HGA adapted the patient unit prototype to align with their system standards, for a 16-bed observation unit expansion on campus. Remarkably, this unit was designed and delivered in just 8 months, a process that would typically take about 2 years through traditional design and construction methods. The observation unit incorporates a balance of Advocate Aurora’s system standards and HGA’s evidence-based design prototype, focusing on work efficacy, deployment, visibility, and staff wellbeing to support clinical best practices. In addition to patient beds, the unit includes amenities such as a staff lounge, adequate staff support spaces, and fully integrated MEP systems to support the unit as an easily maintainable extension of the campus.
What’s Next
With healthcare organizations needing to do more with less while on accelerated project timelines and the industry embracing fully prefabricated and modular facilities, a patient care prototype unit designed on clinical best practice and deployed with modular construction can provide profound benefits to organizations, patients, and staff. This approach can be extended beyond observation and inpatient units and be readily applied to emergency departments, ambulatory surgery centers, clinics, and other hospital departments.
By leveraging prefabrication and modularity, healthcare organizations can benefit from standardized design elements, streamlined construction processes, easily maintainable facilities, and optimized utilization of resources, leading to expedited construction timelines, enhanced operational efficiency, and improved patient and staff experiences.
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About the Author
A recognized expert in Lean project delivery and prefabricated construction strategies, Kyle has 14+ years of experience managing healthcare projects regionally and nationally, with an emphasis on standardized, modular, and pre-fabrication strategies.
