Exterior of Baystate Health Hospital
Springfield, MA – On March 16, the project team for Baystate Health’s Hospital of the Future project was honored with the 2015 Vista Award for New Construction at the PDC Summit in San Antonio, Texas. Sponsored by the American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE), the annual Vista awards recognize the importance of collaborative teamwork in creating optimal, sustainable healthcare environments.
Completed in 2012, the 641,000sf Hospital of the Future provides an immense three-wing facility that has added several interdisciplinary components to the Baystate campus, including the new Davis Family Heart and Vascular Center as well as an Emergency and Level-1 Trauma Center.
Located in Springfield, Mass., Baystate Medical Center is the only academic tertiary/quaternary medical care facility serving the central southern region of New England. As part of a 15-year master plan, Baystate Health engaged long-time partners at Steffian Bradley Architects (SBA), Suffolk Construction, and R. G. Vanderweil Engineers to undertake this large-scale campus expansion.
This most recent award is the sixth Vista that SBA has received over the firm’s 80-year history, and the third with long-term partners at Baystate. Previous Vista-winning Baystate projects include the D’Amour Center for Cancer Care, a 64,000sf freestanding comprehensive oncology center completed in 2004; and the 3300 Main Street and Chestnut Surgery Center project, which was undertaken as a joint venture between SBA and HKS, Inc., of Dallas, Texas, completed in 1998.
The Hospital of the Future represents the latest of several efforts to streamline the healthcare organization’s patient-centered delivery of care. At the outset of the undertaking, Steffian Bradley Architects and Sterling Planning Alliance worked with Baystate to develop a set of guiding principles that would not only outline the future of this building project but would also guide the future of the institution as a whole.
To derive these principles, more than 200 individuals were involved over the course of the project’s development. These participants included executive committees as well as doctors, nurses, support staff, patient groups, family representatives, and neighborhood councils.
With input from this wide range of voices, the project team was able to orchestrate a facility that could serve the unique needs of all future users. In addition to managing this multifaceted team, the hospital’s project leaders faced several significant challenges. First, the country’s economic downturn of 2008 slowed the project’s initial funding and sitework endeavors. Then, the team’s planning and execution had to consider complex logistics that would reduce disruption to the surrounding residential neighborhoods across the street. They also needed to minimize impact to ongoing clinical services that would continue to be operational in buildings located just mere feet from the new construction site. In addition, the team wanted to plan and design space to accommodate Baystate’s future growth.
Through careful planning over years of weekly meetings, the team was able to execute a multiphased project, in which the core and shell of the hospital were completed first, with interior fit-out being conducted in several subsequent stages. Convincing the Mass. Department of Health to approve the project in this way required the support and understanding of the project’s many community participants.
Today, the hospital provides the campus with a state-of-the-art, flexible, attractive, and sustainable facility that will support Baystate’s efforts to become a more interdisciplinary and communal practice. This quiet, spacious, and adaptive facility is just the beginning of Baystate’s evolution into the future of patient care.
