New Heart and Cardiovascular Center Expands Care Options for Surrounding Community
July 17, 2024 – Lakewood, CO — Over the last few decades as surrounding communities have grown, AdventHealth Littleton has continued to expand to meet the growing need for healthcare in the area. The hospital is in the midst of another expansion, bringing additional heart and vascular resources to a major hospital in Littleton, Colorado.
Encore Electric is partnering with Saunders Construction to power the expansion of AdventHealth Littleton Heart and Vascular Tower and central utility plant – bringing new lab spaces, procedure rooms, operating rooms, a 24-bed ICU for cardiac care and support spaces, all allowing for current and future expansion of the hospital’s cardiovascular department. Beyond the new medical spaces in the expansion, the project also includes a new CAT generator and control system that parallel the new generator with the generators in the existing building.
Each lab, procedure room, and operating room requires its own custom electrical infrastructure. Encore Electric worked closely with AdventHealth Littleton and the suppliers of medical technology to ensure proper power is delivered to each room and lab space. The electrical infrastructure for such medical technology often takes up significant physical space, usually placed in the ceiling. An additional challenge for the preconstruction team was accommodating the design of the new addition to match the original hospital built in the late 1980s. The original hospital had less ceiling room to store electrical and HVAC, making the integration of new infrastructure into the existing structure more complex.
Construction of the hospital expansion is taking place while the hospital is still active, requiring an extra level of planning and coordination throughout the construction process to avoid disruption to patients and staff. Encore Electric has worked closely with project partners and hospital staff to ensure a safe and smooth construction process for everyone on the hospital campus throughout the project.
When preparing to install the new sectionalizers and a medium voltage transformer, a process that could potentially shut down hospital power for a full day, Encore Electric met with hospital staff, including doctors and nurses, to develop a precise schedule that would be convenient for staff and patients.
“We as Encore look at every little detail no matter how small,” said Jessica Linder, assistant project manager. “Everything from planning the start of the shutdown to coincide with sunrise to supplement the temporary lighting we distributed to each floor, to taking photos of every existing panelboard schedule and investigating and reviewing each circuit with hospital staff to determine items that needed to be temporarily refed with extension cords.”
The team performed practice shutdowns so they knew exactly what to expect from the process, and scheduled the shutdown for a Sunday morning when the hospital is typically quiet. Initially, they thought the shutdown would take eight hours, but after planning and preparation ahead of time the Encore Electric team was able to reduce the shutdown to just two hours.
“The Encore Electric preconstruction, operations, and internal engineering teams worked closely together to support the general contractor, design teams, and the hospital’s facilities team,” said Preconstruction Manager Dustin Ditri. “Our group provided constructability feedback, real-time estimating, and cost-saving ideas. We made a point to provide solutions to challenges encountered during preconstruction and not just identify problems for others to solve. The result of this collaboration was a high-quality and high-value design with a solid plan on how to execute the work with minimal disruption to the hospital.”
“We have had orders from LAH ranging from underground duct banks, overhead Silverman’s, painted fittings to strut racks and wall rough,” said Jordie Klosterman, prefabrication manager. “The project team, VDC, and prefab have worked to establish a BIM-Fab-Build approach with the different orders and the electric room racks. What sets Encore Electric apart is having those project teams that buy into this approach, and we are able to integrate seamlessly as a whole team working toward the one goal of providing a quality product for our end users and customers.”
“I’m a Colorado native, it’s nice to be able to do work and contribute to a community I’ve grown up in,” said Senior Project Manager Kevin Kosters.
The anticipated completion date of Encore Electric’s work on this project is March 2025, with most major construction wrapping up by the end of the year. The hospital expects to see the first patients in the new facilities by July 2025.
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