UCHealth embarked on a 160,000-sq-ft addition at Memorial North to keep pace with the expanding health care needs of Colorado Springs. The project also renovated existing tower space and expanded the central utility plant. The addition is home to women’s care and birth center services, including 10 exam rooms, two operating rooms, 24 post-partum rooms, a well-baby nursery, six obstetric treatment rooms, eight oncology exam rooms, a computed tomography (CT) scan room, a laboratory and 14 infusion rooms. The renovation involved several thousand square feet of existing space with a lab, pharmacy, sterile processing, food and nutrition, imaging and emergency services. The upgraded utility plant provides emergency power backup, domestic water and heated and cooled water to the entire campus.

Among the major challenges was connecting the UCHealth Memorial North expansion with an adjacent and concurrently built facility for the Children’s Hospital of Colorado (CHCO) via a four-story corridor. The partnership between UCHealth and CHCO allows both organizations to serve patients without them having to leave the building. This ensures that no matter where patients enter the facility, they can quickly get to where they need to go for their health care needs.

The team communicated with multiple stakeholders about how to minimize disruptions on a busy hospital campus. Onsite prefabrication of patient rooms and headwalls helped keep the project on schedule, while exterior stud framing, sheathing and air weather barrier were prefabricated off site. Prefabrication of the exterior skin accelerated the schedule by reducing installation time to eight weeks from 12.

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