Designed by HGA with Champlin Architecture, the site streamlines the patient experience.
The University of Kentucky broke ground on a 550,000-square-foot facility that will become the new home to the UK Markey Cancer Center, Kentucky’s only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, as well as a Comprehensive Spine Center, ambulatory surgery space, and other outpatient services.
Design Architect HGA with Champlin Architecture as the Architect of Record, designed the site to focus on the patient experience. UK needed a home for oncology treatment that maintains its status as a destination academic medical center and a new facility to grow ambulatory services to improve patient access in an outpatient setting.
UK asked for the design to support separate, distinct identities for the cancer and ambulatory spaces, along with connections back to the acute care hospital and an enhanced patient experience. The resulting design welcomes and reassures patients during a stressful time in their lives, when they may be traveling to an unfamiliar environment for care, and sometimes even visiting Lexington for the first time.
The development is oriented away from a busy main hospital campus entry to create the feeling of an outpatient pavilion at a more welcoming scale for visitors. To support a healing patient experience, materials such as wood, stone, and colors that evoke Kentucky landscapes were employed to create a sense of warmth. Generous landscape spaces, clear pathways for cars and pedestrians, intuitive way-finding and natural daylighting throughout the campus provide an optimal environment for healing.
The planning and design process played a pivotal role in helping address a unique challenge faced by larger inpatient campuses: how to separate ambulatory services and create for them distinct spaces with unique identities and experiential possibilities. In the case of the new center, the team successfully transformed the site into a prominent gateway, offering a clear ambulatory component that welcomes patients and establishes a singular identity, flexible enough to work on various scales. Moreover, the center is thoughtfully connected to the main acute care hospital, enhancing operational efficiencies.
To meet leadership’s goals of co-locating oncology specialties, the team implemented an incredibly efficient modular clinic plan employed across multiple levels of clinical cancer care. The center also houses two floors of advanced ambulatory services including an ambulatory surgery center and comprehensive spine specialty services and reserves one shell floor for future growth of complementary services. Encircling an open landscape garden, the site development also accommodates loading dock services and connects to campus utilities that are sized to support an additional development of up to 450,000 SF for a future Phase Two building.
“The Cancer and Advanced Ambulatory Building will leave a lasting legacy for UK,” said Rebecca Sanders, principal at HGA. “The land use and site plan create a striking new campus brand and entrance, and positions UK HealthCare for responsible growth in the future.”
The center itself will serve as a standard for flexible and adaptable clinic design that will be implemented across UK HealthCare.
The project supports Markey Cancer Center’s desire to advance precision medicine and apheresis, actively anticipating future research and incorporating precision medicine approaches. Markey is also preparing to provide outpatient bone marrow transplants, a significant shift from the traditional inpatient setting. This requires creating suitable spaces and resources to support the care of highly vulnerable patients.
“The new facility embodies the research-driven, transdisciplinary care that is the hallmark of an NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center by providing the infrastructure to expand clinical trials, accelerate discoveries, and ensure our patients have access to the most innovative treatments available,” said Robert S. DiPaola, M.D., UK provost and co-executive vice president for health affairs.
The project site plan originated with HGA’s work on the UK Campus Master Plan. The plan identified the area as a new ambulatory district and noted city street system and utilities that needed to be enhanced and reorganized to support current and future needs. The land use plan and creation of a new ambulatory district was new to UK leadership: it makes the best, most efficient use of the limited available space and ensures that UK is making the best use of its resources.
Project partners include Champlin Architecture and Walsh Construction.
Learn more about this milestone from the University of Kentucky here.