All Articles

On Point: A One-Stop Shop for Surgical Care

Facility Construction and Design

By: Daniel Cook

Published: 2/19/2020

Share:
All Articles

The benefits of building a new surgery center in an old department store.


The main medical campus of the Medical University of South Carolina sits on the Charleston peninsula between Routes 17 and 30, in the midst of seemingly constant traffic snarls. "We made a strategic decision that for non-tertiary care, we needed to do a better job of integrating health care into the communities we serve," says Tom Crawford, MUSC's interim COO.

That's C-suite speak for relocating the health system's ambulatory offerings — surgeries, clinics and imaging — to a convenient location near where patients live instead of forcing them drive to historic Charleston for needed care.

A little more than five miles west of the campus is Citadel Mall, where a shuttered JCPenney had fallen victim to Amazon and rising real estate costs. The mall's developer offered to cover half of the $32 million renovation costs if MUSC leased the 126,000-square-foot space for $2 million per year.

Sold.

MUSC signed the deal in late 2017 and began transforming the space into a large diagnostic imaging center, multidisciplinary physician clinics, a muscular skeletal institute and a surgery center with two ORs and two procedure rooms. The renovation was completed on Thanksgiving Day 2019 and the West Ashley Medical Pavilion opened its doors to patients on Dec. 30.

"I gave our team a little over four weeks to operationalize a building of that size and magnitude," says Mr. Crawford. "And they did it. It took a lot of long nights and working almost every weekend, but we achieved a seamless opening in a little over a month."

The project highlights several themes you'll notice throughout this issue, our annual look at how to reinvent existing spaces or lay foundations for successful new builds: creative thinking, planning for future growth and innovation, and smart designs that emphasize patient-centered care and staff satisfaction. For example:

BLOWOUT SALE Renovating existing spaces instead of building from scratch reduces on-site development expenses and overall construction costs.   |  MUSC
  • Creative designs. The box-shaped shell of the former JCPenney served as an ideal blank canvas in which architects and interior designers retrofitted patient care areas off a straight-line corridor that runs down the center of the space. The hallway is roughly 100 yards long, so the designers included football yardage markers to help patients navigate the space. Looking for the surgery center? Head down to the 25-yard line and cut left.

A pair of escalators in the center of the store filled a large atrium under a massive skylight. The escalators were removed, but the skylight remains, allowing tons of natural light to stream into the center of the facility.

  • Satisfied customers. The old rule of thumb for healthcare construction projects: three parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of a buildout. Now, as demand for surgery has increased, especially in orthopedics, five parking spaces are needed for every thousand square feet of real estate.

Luckily, finding a spot to park at a mall is rarely an issue. "For us to get a large space that we could develop in a convenient location with ample parking was a winning scenario all the way around," says Mr. Crawford. "We wanted to maximize the patient experience, and we believe we've done that."

Patients aren't the only ones who are pleased with the new campus. MUSC's orthopedic surgeons can hold clinic appointments in the morning, schedule imaging or physical therapy appointments under the same roof and walk down the hall to perform surgery in the afternoon.

  • Room for growth. MUSC is pushing 600 clinic and surgery patients to the location each day, an impressive rate achieved in a short period of time, and the numbers are only expected to increase over time. The new facility boasts plenty of shelled-out space for future growth — Mr. Crawford says 80% of the footprint's square footage is currently in use — and the parking capacity to handle many more patients.
  • Localized care. MUSC's expansion outside of its main campus reflects a larger national trend: building in population centers and consolidating the services offered in the area to give patients an option close to home.

"The attitude used to be, "You'll come to us for care,' but that's no longer what patients expect," says Mr. Crawford. "They want surgical care closer to home. You have to provide it at an easily accessible location for the populations you serve.

"Healthcare is essentially a service industry, and if we're truly going to fulfill the needs of our patients, we must ensure we're designing facilities to deliver world-class care to the patients we serve," says Mr. Crawford. OSM

Related Articles