The 2025 Healthcare Design Conference + Expo, heads to Kansas City, Mo., Oct. 25-28, bringing three days of keynote and educational sessions for attendees.
Healthcare Design is previewing some of the upcoming educational sessions in a series of Q+As with speakers, sharing what they plan to discuss and key takeaways they’ll offer attendees.
Session: “E06 – Innovate and Accelerate: Achieving Speed-to-Market with Progressive Design-Build”
Sunday, Oct. 26, 9:45-10:45 a.m.
Speakers: Gabriel Fonseca, senior principal, SmithGroup; Creed Kampa, director of facilities, planning and development, University of California Davis Health; Jacqueline Lee, project architect, SmithGroup; Abe Sipes, business unit leader, DPR Construction
Facing growing demand and rising costs, University of California Davis Health (UC Davis Health; Davis, Calif.) used a progressive design-build approach to ensure its 48X Complex, a 260,000-square-foot outpatient surgery center in Sacramento, Calif., was completed efficiently and delivered on budget and a reduced timeline.
During this presentation, the speakers will discuss key strategies to delivering the project—which opened in July to patients and within 45 months of the project being awarded—such as early engagement and validation as well as real-time cost and schedule data.
Healthcare Design: What are the first steps to initiating a progressive design-design approach?
Creed Kampa: One of the primary benefits of the progressive design-build procurement method is the opportunity for collaboration early in the project. On the UC Davis Health 48X Complex, a necessary, and fun, first step was to spend intentional time and effort building a healthy, high-performing team.
The design-build team spent significant time early on (even before project award) setting team expectations, understanding how to best communicate with each other, defining team governance, and determining conditions of satisfaction. This intentional teaming helped establish a foundation that allowed all project stakeholders to work collaboratively, efficiently, and make robust and lasting decisions.
Abe Sipes (Headshot credit: Courtesy of DPR Construction)
Abe Sipes: DPR Construction and SmithGroup started teambuilding during the pursuit phase of the project. After the project award, several off-site teaming workshops were facilitated by a third-party moderator. Through these exercises, we were able to reinforce team expectations, understand how we best communicate with each other, define team governance, and the conditions of satisfaction.
HCD: How did you identify and design prefabrication elements on the project, and why was that important?
Jacqueline Lee: The project team understood early that prefabrication would be a significant strategy to allow for efficient construction and to achieve the project’s aggressive schedule.
Prefabrication is most effective when it is planned very early. This allowed building elements to be identified and designed around. Our first step was to leverage resources to identify every possible prefabricated element, regardless of practicality.
Once that was complete, the team analyzed the effectiveness of each prefabricated element and narrowed down those that would provide value to the project. This exercise was completed in early schematic designs and allowed the team to identify constraints and design around them effectively.
Jacqueline Lee (Headshot credit: Rebecca Wilkowski Photography, courtesy of SmithGroup)
An example of a less-practical prefabricated element was the use of prefabricated, prefinished bathroom pods for all bathrooms throughout the entire building. The initial thought was that the project could utilize these prefabricated pods at all locations. However, upon further analysis, it was determined that a portion of the bathrooms did not lend themselves to the prefabricated approach. The multistall bathrooms were obvious exclusions, but there were others that did not meet the size or space restrictions of the architecture.
As a result, several bathrooms were built in a traditional method, and prefabricated bathrooms that were more uniform in size and layout lent themselves to the prefabricated approach.
Sipes: The structural system and exterior wall panels are also examples of how the team identified and implemented prefabricated elements into the project. As the schedule was consistently our challenge, both options offered time savings during construction.
Early coordination and identification of areas of variation allowed the team to move quickly in design and commit to the early deadlines, such as putting in the mill order for the structural system and making the building water-tight so that interior work could occur earlier.
HCD: How did the use of augmented reality reduce costs and benefit a project timeline?
Sipes: Augmented reality (AR) allows the building to be built virtually and identify potential clashes before expending labor on-site. There is a level of effort to create these models. However, when done effectively, it helps the team to identify constraints/clashes ahead of time and allows the construction team to move forward without reworking installed work or having to stop to figure out unique conditions.
Gabriel Fonseca (Headshot credit: Kim Nguyen Photography, courtesy of SmithGroup)
Gabriel Fonseca: From a design standpoint, gaining user understanding of the space within a specific timeline is never an easy task. With the use of AR, we were able to walk users, both stakeholders and staff, through spaces they were going to use without having to build full physical mock-ups of specialty spaces. Feedback could be incorporated quickly, as adjustments could be made between different user group visits.
HCD: What’s one takeaway from your session that you hope attendees walk away with?
Kampa: Successful progressive design-build projects require a highly collaborative approach to design and construction. When used strategically, the delivery method allows for efficient design and ultimately allows the design-build team to deliver a product to an owner that is aligned with quality and cost expectations.
Find updates and additional information on the 2025 HCD Conference + Expo here.
Robert McCune is senior editor of Healthcare Design and can be reached at [email protected].
