Expansion Made Efficient

A New Hospital Paradigm Travels the Fast Track in Katy

By Rob Patterson

The $66 million Memorial Hermann Katy Hospital creates a new paradigm for hospital facilities and serves as a template for the Houston-based health-care giant's expansion of services within the greater Houston area.

The seven-story, 307,000-sq.-ft. structure is being built as a co-venture by the Austin office of Hensel Phelps Construction Co. and Houston-based SpawMaxwell Co. under a guaranteed-maximum-price contract.

Ground was broken in April 2005 for the project, which replaces an existing Memorial Hermann hospital in the Houston suburb of Katy. Construction will be completed at the end of September for a December opening.

The contractors on the 132-bed facility have faced a fast-track schedule. "If you've built a hospital before, this is not a hard job," said Paul Stirling, Hensel Phelps project manager. "What makes this hospital hard is the speed.

"Imagine putting the shovel in the ground on April 1 of '05, and by Sept. 30 of '06, your punch list is going to be 80 to 90 percent done. For the next two months you assist the owner while equipment and furniture are moved in and testing is performed to ensure everything is working properly to begin treating patients on Dec. 1."

Dax Studebaker, project superintendent for Hensel Phelps, said the first difficulty was value engineering about 10 percent out of the project to get within the owner's budget. "We worked closely with the design team and the owner to come up with a list of ideas to save money while the owner would still get the desired end product," he added.

The team was able to reduce the cost by $6 million and value engineer most of it within two weeks. Among the reductions were shaving the contractor's allowances, reducing mechanical costs by about $1 million and shelling some areas of the building intended for future use.

advertisement

Meeting the rapid timetable was aided by paving a substantial portion of the 65-acre site adjacent to Interstate 10 prior to laying the building's foundation. "A lot of the site paving in front was done when we started the foundation, and it was beneficial because we had a lot of working surfaces to work from for material storage and site access," Stirling said.

A final total of 470,000 sq. ft. of parking was poured using 9,300 cu. yds. of concrete. The campus will include a five-story, 129,000-sq.-ft. professional office building being simultaneously constructed by D.E. Harvey Builders of Houston.

The hospital structure is primarily reinforced, cast-in-place concrete. The frame of a two-story administrative wing is structural steel, and steel is being used in the lantern structure atop the central tower, an identifying icon being used on all Memorial Hermann facilities. Concrete tilt-wall was used on the mechanical wing at the rear of the building.

The exterior is a combination of ribbon windows on the tower, window wall on the lower levels, precast concrete panels, calcium-silicate masonry units and some plaster on the lower levels. The lantern includes aluminum panels.

The 6-ft.-thick concrete foundation slab is supported by 137 bell piers drilled 15 ft. into the dirt. A total of 18,521 cu. yds. of concrete was poured for the structure.

The building's design was developed as a prototype for the Katy facility and a hospital under way in Sugar Land that is smaller in size by approximately 60,000 sq. ft.

"We've been one of Houston's most prolific developers in any industry, and certainly the most prolific in the health-care industry," said Marshall Heins, vice president of construction, real estate and support services for Memorial Hermann Healthcare System. "As we've done this, we've determined that we would like to move to more of a standardized type of development construction.

"When we went out to bid for architectural services and engineering and all the other consultants, we said, 'Look, we're going to basically do this same building twice, and then probably do it more in some new markets in the Houston area, so bid your fees accordingly."

Building two similar hospitals and adjacent professional office buildings simultaneously helped cut material costs, too. "We were able to aggregate our spending on medical equipment, glass, steel, concrete," Heins said. "By placing much larger orders, we can basically negotiate the price of those at the time."

The building design breaks away from the traditional institutional style of hospitals, taking cues from the hospitality industry and contemporary office buildings. "We were basically looking at three things that we felt identified as best practice in health care: operational efficiency, consumer appeal and family-centered care," said Mark Vaughan, senior medical planner for WHR Architects in Houston.

"One of our beliefs is that people don't want to be housed as patients in an institutional environment. If we can make them feel more at home or in more of a hospitality environment, they can heal much faster and feel happier. The days of the concrete floor and CMU or tile walls, the pale greens and Pepto-Bismol pinks are gone."

The central patient tower, with only private rooms, is configured around a 30-bed nursing-unit. On the ground level is a two-story public concourse.

The tower features an on-stage/off-stage division between the patient-care spaces at the front of the tower and support facilities at the back, with separate elevator banks. "The idea is that ancillary support and equipment and dietary, linen and supply carts that go up and down the building are arriving on an offstage area, making them less intrusive for patients and visitors," Vaughan said.

The design required extra coordination for the builders. "It's got a lot of tiers and levels and it's not a box, per se," Studebaker said. "Each footprint steps in and gets smaller as it goes up until you get to level four." From level four up, the footprint is consistent.

"It's got a lot of radiuses and non-right-angle type construction."

The tight timeline meant proceeding without following normal scheduling routines. "We were working fast and furious to keep up with the desired move-in date," Vaughan said. "We were issuing multiple packages for site, foundation, building-shell and core and interior build-out. We were under the gun to keep all that rolling. At the same time we were adjusting things to meet the ultimate budget of the project."

The builders had to be flexible as the structure went up. "We made some suggestions on the bid packages, and they couldn't necessarily produce the drawings fast enough for us," Stirling said. "So there were literally subcontractors bought on the basis that they would be starting late."

Stirling said the project is truly a 50-50 co-venture between Hensel Phelps and SpawMaxwell, even though the former is primarily known for its expertise in shell construction and the latter specializes in hospital interior build-outs. It also required the contractors to be versatile in the tasks they performed.

"We've built two bridges to access the feeder road of IH-10," Stirling said. "And it appears that we are going to do some feeder-road work that TxDOT is going to require of Memorial Hermann."

He said that Hensel Phelps has not done road work for a number of years. "We're getting a widespread gamut of all the work out here," he added. "But that's what being full-service is all about."