Constructing a replacement hospital next to an existing facility brings with it a number of difficult issues: vibration and noise control, maintaining operations in the adjacent building, and the rerouting and directing of patients, visitors, and staff. But attempting to handle all of these issues while dealing with the stringent codes and regulations of the state of California and keeping a 450,000-square-foot hospital project on time and under budget, is another task entirely. That’s exactly what the construction and architecture teams of Rudolph & Sletten and KMD Architects, respectively, did with the help of vice-president of facilities Ken King at the new El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California.
“Probably one of the biggest issues anyone has working in California on healthcare projects, is that the process with OSHPD is a very long one,” says Richard Sheng, director of KMD Architects. “There are challenges with a project of this size—450,000 square feet of the new building plus the replacement of a central plant that is still in operation. A lot of the challenges were just getting through agency review and approval in a relatively timely fashion.”
Staying on time was of primary importance to the owner, and Ken King was charged with making sure the project stayed on schedule. To do so, he implemented a unique incentive program that first and foremost attempted to avoid change orders and unexpected issues that would cause delays once construction was underway.
“One of the challenges of building hospitals in California is uncertainty with respect to the inspection processes and revisions to the documents that require permit revision during construction,” says Paul Moran, vice-president of operations, Rudolph & Sletten. “There had been an agreement to account some time for those occurrences if they indeed did happen. One of the incentives was to provide a cost-sharing program—or savings-sharing—if that time wasn’t needed in the project. There was some time allocated that didn’t need to be used and [King] offered a certain allocation of savings to the construction and design team as incentive to complete the project on the original schedule.”
