(IND) Perfecting prefab: 8 tips for healthcare construction projects - Leading AEC firms offer helpful advice for using BIM to pull off prefab for everything from MEP infrastructure to whole bathrooms.

By employing advanced prefabrication techniques, the Building Team for the 840,000-sf, $625 million Exempla St. Joseph Heritage Hospital in Denver was able to compress the project’s original construction schedule by nearly six months. More than 160 overhead multi-trade racks were assembled by subcontractors in a local warehouse, shipped to the site, and hoisted into place. The method shaved a month off the project schedule. Courtesy Mortenson Construction

Nick Pfenning thought he knew what fast track was before joining the Exempla St. Joseph Heritage Hospital project in Denver. As an eight-year construction management veteran with Mortenson Construction, Pfenning has worked on several tightly scheduled healthcare projects, including the 376,000-sf, $150 million Exempla Lutheran Medical Center, built in just 30 months.

But those efforts pale in comparison to what the Building Team is attempting with the St. Joseph’s project: 840,000 sf of program space, worth some $625 million, in less than 31 months.

“This isn’t fast track, this is psycho track, as far as the schedule goes,” says Pfenning, Assistant Superintendent in Mortenson’s Denver office.  

Eight hundred miles southeast, in Dallas, another Building Team—led by Austin Commercial and Balfour Beatty, with Corgan and HDR as the design architects—is nearing completion on the nation’s largest public hospital construction project. This summer, less than four years after breaking ground, the 1.7 million-sf, $1.2 billion, 862-bed Parkland Replacement Hospital will be completed.

Both fast-track megaprojects—and dozens of smaller healthcare facilities across the U.S.—are being built in record time, thanks, in part, to the implementation of advanced multi-trade prefabrication techniques. By assembling components like MEP infrastructure, headwalls, bathrooms, patient rooms, and exterior elements offsite in a controlled environment, Building Teams are able to compress project schedules by performing multiple construction activities in parallel.

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