Mercy Health Kings Mills Hospital Delivers New Prototype Approach
GBBN
A campus ring road provides connectivity to all departments of the Mercy Health Kings Mills Hospital and a main drive unites all the public access points from north to south: the medical office building (MOB), main lobby, discharge, and emergency department. Radially organized parking provides intuitive connection to each of the four main access points.
GBBN
Clad in metal, fiber-reinforced concrete panels, and glass, Kings Mills’ exterior features a crisp and modern aesthetic. The main entrance serves as the hub of the Y-shaped hospital, with the hospital on the left, MOB on the right, and back-of-house staff space off to the back.
GBBN
Echoing the interior of a Gothic cathedral, the lobby’s vaulted wood ribs, inlaid cross, and double-height ceiling provide a peaceful place for patients and their families to collect themselves before their visit.
GBBN
Filled with daylight and views of the surrounding landscape, the MOB waiting room is carved out from the circulation path by interior finishes including a custom screen and more wood fins.
GBBN
The design uses rounded corners and wood-marked destinations to create a soft, inviting environment on the inpatient floors.
GBBN
Nestled between the hospital, MOB, and the main entrance, the courtyard provides a central place for visitors, patients, and staff to relax
Mason, Ohio, is a city of 36,000-plus residents, a suburb of sorts to both Dayton, Ohio, and Cincinnati, and situated a half-hour drive from each city.
It’s also a growing, family-friendly community in its own right, home to high-profile state landmarks such as Kings Island amusement park and the Cincinnati Open pro tennis tournament, as well as big employers including LensCrafters’ headquarters and a Procter & Gamble campus.
Until recently, however, Mason (and its surrounding Warren County) didn’t have its own hospital. In 2021, looking to establish an inpatient footprint in the area, Cincinnati-based Bon Secours Mercy Health (BSMH) announced plans to build Mercy Health Kings Mills Hospital, a 60-bed facility and medical office building (MOB).
“That northeast I-71 corridor is a hub of population and economic growth,” says Mickey LeRoy, healthcare principal with GBBN Architects (Cincinnati).
“It’s also a retail-driven area—people are used to driving to get what they need, walking into a building and getting service. Mercy Health has large regional medical centers elsewhere, but this was an opportunity to bring something in at a scale that would include inpatient but be designed along an ambulatory model.”
At 200,000 square feet, the project also presented BSMH an opportunity to test the limits of its new standardized, scalable facility template for ambulatory care.
Building a repeatable Lego-module approach
Mercy Health operates healthcare facilities in Ohio and Kentucky under the BSMH umbrella, which was created in 2018 when Mercy merged with Bon Secours Health System.
At that time, Mercy Health’s ambulatory team was exploring the concept of simplified clinic modules as a streamlined way to scale future facilities. The initiative was expanded for all of BSMH, and the organization enlisted GBBN, which had built projects for Mercy Health in the past, to develop the prototypes.
“One of the first projects we’d ever done for Mercy was an MOB and imaging center,” says Amy Mees, principal, lead medical planner, and interior designer at GBBN. “The planning for that clinic was very regular and repeatable; it looked like Lego blocks. And I think Mercy saw an opportunity there and coined the term ‘Lego planning.’”
With the merger, Mees continues, “there was going to be a lot of building happening, and fast. We took that methodology of the clinic planning and applied it to other departmental planning blocks—from emergency to surgery to inpatient. We were almost rigid in the design, making them all very rectangular.” In that way, each module is designed to “snap” together with others, side by side and vertically.
It’s an approach that aligns with BSMH’s overall mission and design philosophy. Molly Ironmonger, system director of planning and preconstruction for BSMH, stresses that the health system is a faith-based, nonprofit organization.
“We’re very pragmatic about how we build our hospitals,” she says. “We put as much money into our patient care spaces as possible so we can deliver more care. The environment is built around creating more efficient process flow.”
The repeatable Lego-module approach addresses a couple of key issues for BSMH. One, it allows for faster, more cost-effective planning and construction on each project and from building to building. And two, it provides predictable environments for staff, which simplifies training and also makes things easier for those who work at multiple facilities (increasingly common amid ongoing staff shortages).
With the bones in place, says Chris Knueven, BSMH’s vice president of design and construction, the emphasis turns to creating welcoming, warm, and bright surroundings. “We try to focus from the inside out,” he says.
“You start with the Lego blocks and connecting those together, and then non-clinical spaces (entryways, lobbies, staff amenities) can be more customized for 20 to 25 percent of the overall structure.”
BSMH introduces new medical center model
GBBN created prototypes for three scaled sizes of facilities, defined as neighborhood (25,000 square feet), community (50,000 square feet), and regional (100,000 square feet and up).
By the time Mercy Health Kings Mills came along, BSMH had already built a neighborhood clinic—a freestanding emergency department (ED) with 10 beds and an imaging department—and a community-sized facility, which included MOBs and specialty clinics.
The scalability of the model was tested with the design of Kings Mills, which would be BSMH’s first new regional medical center. It incorporates an imaging department, ambulatory surgery center (ASC) that’s also equipped for inpatient surgery, 60-bed inpatient unit, and connected MOB.
BSMH’s experience with the smaller facilities paved the way nicely. “We took some of those same modular pieces, and we took some of the adjacency considerations,” Ironmonger says.
“We had already mapped out what an ASC should look like. With each new project, we review the facilities we’ve already built. And it allows for a continuous improvement mindset to be brought from care delivery all the way through design delivery.”
Elements of a “utilitarian chic” aesthetic
Mercy Health Kings Mills is shaped like a Y, with the hospital on one arm, MOB on another, and back-of-house staff spaces composing the stem, situated behind the facility. The main entrance sits where the three sections converge, fully fronted in glass with a porte-cochere for easy wayfinding.
In keeping with BSMH’s mission, the overall hospital aesthetic is fairly simple. “Outside of the lobby, everything is what I’d call ‘utilitarian chic,’” Ironmonger says. “It’s all done in a very lovely way, but it’s done cost-effectively.”
The lobby, however, introduces a little wow factor. “Here, we wanted to make a statement,” Ironmonger adds.
With about 4,000 square feet, the double-height lobby is light and airy, benefiting from floor-to-ceiling window walls on both the entrance side and the back wall, where the space overlooks a cozy public courtyard. Dramatic wood-toned fins curve up the walls and along the ceiling, guiding the eye upward in the manner of old cathedrals. A simple cross adorns the feature wall, behind which is tucked a small chapel.
“We wanted to convey Mercy’s ministry through this modern interpretation,” says Ivan Cheung, principal at GBBN and the project’s lead designer. The wooden ribbing shows up elsewhere throughout the project, scaled to denote other public-serving amenities (including the registration desk) and secondary entry points.
The location and layout of the lobby also play a critical role in serving the retail-focused nature of the community.
“The minute you walk in the front door, you can see all your destinations laid out right in front of you,” says GBBN’s LeRoy. “In a typical medical center experience, you might be parking in a garage somewhere, coming up [into the building] without really knowing where you are.”
Once patients and families walk in from the surrounding surface parking lot into the lobby, it’s possible to see all the way from one end of the hospital (along the public corridor that fronts the ED and imaging) to the other end of the MOB.
A large, open staircase in the lobby leads directly up to the surgical center on the second floor. A café sits behind the staircase on the first floor, also overlooking the outdoor courtyard.
Tweaking the hospital prototype
The BSMH team is happy with how the prototype approach is playing out, giving them the opportunity to tweak and customize it with each new project without losing the deeper benefits of speed and continuity.
Working on Mercy Health Kings Mills, the project team was challenged by its size—at 200,000 square feet, it’s twice the size they’d envisioned for the regional scale model—but learned more about where the sticking points were.
“It starts to break down when you approach the level and size of a tertiary center,” Ironmonger says, “because the complexity of the built environment increases as the complexity of patient needs increases. The rules of design that work in smaller facilities don’t apply when higher acuity equipment and standards need to be considered.
“But for this sort of medium-sized hospital, these Lego blocks serve really well,” she continues. “The fundamental blocks, the patient rooms, lab, pharmacy—they can all stay similar [as they are for a small clinic] but grow.”
For more, read “Putting Prefabrication To The Test At Mercy Health Kings Mills In Cincinnati.”
Kristin D. Zeit is a contributing editor at Healthcare Design and can be reached at [email protected].
