Anticipation is building for the Pavilion at Penn Medicine, which will be an innovative building on the cutting edge of hospital construction and design when it opens in 2021. Exactly what it will look like inside, however, is still something of a work-in-progress. While garage construction is underway at the site of the $1.5 billion project, the floor plan design for the patient room layout was recently altered, according to the university’s newspaper.
Part of the innovation already planned was to have rooms that converted from intensive care to a standard room or even from an operating room to recovery to discharge. Each room will also have its own private bathroom. Technology will be worked into the construction and design of the largest capital project in the university’s history and the city of Philadelphia’s most sophisticated and ambitious healthcare building.
The new design will allow for “quicker room conversion, more greeting space for visitors, and patients will be able to change room conditions with the new technology.”
While, the number of rooms will remain at approximately the same 700 total, the design’s previous floor plan included two 32-bed units on a patient floor, separated by a central public elevator and waiting space, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian. The change in design will divide the beds into three units. Each unit now will contain 24 beds and will be separated by two elevator cores that serve as midpoints between each section. All of the rooms will be identically oriented with beds and bathrooms on the same side to make conversion easier.
The 1.25 million square-foot building’s eco-friendly construction includes not only the pursuit of LEED certification but plans for the re-use of water, use of 100 percent outside air and plenty of park-like, outdoor green space throughout the Pavilion building for patients, visitors and staff.
CIS Construction Connection 