In February 2020, a three-hospital not-for-profit children’s healthcare system commenced construction of a new facility spanning 2 million square feet, featuring three towers, 19 stories, 446 beds, a Level I Trauma Center, and cutting-edge patient and staff technologies.
The health organization’s vision was to open a fully integrated “smart hospital” in 2024, enhancing quality care, clinical efficiency, and patient experience. The new facility would open using approximately 187 software applications that were already deployed throughout the enterprise, including the core Epic EHR, and approximately 60 new applications to support innovative technology deployments such as a real-time relocation system, patient experience technologies, autonomous mobile robots, and
biomedical device integration. The organization’s plan focused on leveraging technology to better support clinicians, patients, and families in the new hospital.
Planning and implementing the technology (applications, equipment, and infrastructure) of the new facility would require skilled and experienced project leadership to keep a sharp eye on multiple complex project workstreams, metrics, and the needs of diverse and demanding stakeholder groups simultaneously. Impact Advisors was chosen as the consulting partner based on the group’s previous successes at similar organizations as well as their ability to work with clinical, operations, and technical staff to optimize workflows and take full advantage of the new technologies.
The health system’s CIO acknowledged the new facility’s opening as “incredible” and “amazing” and stated that it “could not have gone any better.
Planning
Planning for the transition occurred from August of 2021 through March of 2022. Impact Advisors assigned a small team to focus on:
- Reviewing current and future workflows and associated enabling-technology solutions with clinical, operations and IT stakeholders to identify essential IT requirements to support the new facility and confirm alignment with the overall systems strategy.
- Completing a technical inventory assessment and rationalization of systems, security needs, integrations, designs, interdependencies (facility-related, applications-related, etc.), and contracts/licensing terms.
- Validating technology models for the facility environment as well as any connected or impacted ancillary environments (including the Epic facility structure, which is particularly important in defining clinical and revenue cycle workflows); confirming core technologies and solutions to be included in the plan, as well as their value proposition.
- Developing a detailed project plan and roadmap to transition to the new hospital and meet operational requirements. This includes identifying major risks and recommending remediations, providing governance and IT organization recommendations, and preparing a detailed application readiness project schedule.
- Developing a week-by-week estimation of resources (technology and clinical/operational), skills, and effort required, both by internal as well as retained staff.
- Helping staff see beyond the blueprints and visualize the planned space, so they could effectively plan optimized workflows and placement of enabling technologies.
Implementation
Part two of this project was the execution of the implementation plan, installation of IT infrastructure, configuration, integrating testing, and deployment of all applications in the new facility. From March of 2022 through September of 2024, Impact Advisors’ team of 14 project managers in partnership with the health system’s program leadership executed the high-level program work plan and project-specific work plans. These plans were consistently shared with project teams, maintained, and managed to avoid scope creep and to mitigate impacts from timeline changes.
Key activities included:
- Monitoring activities, task completion, and quality of deliverables to meet work plan and budget milestones, and guiding teams through the project lifecycle to fulfill user and organizational needs.
- Providing leadership to guide new technology onboarding, scope, functional requirements, mock room buildout, hardware procurement and installation, and on-premise rigorous testing of each patient room.
- Coordinating the procurement, installation, and configuration of wired/wireless networks, telecommunications, audiovisual, medical equipment, building systems, and end user devices.
- Maintaining a program dashboard to manage the program comprehensively and proactively. Weekly updates were supported by structured meetings ensuring timely issue and risk escalation. The program utilized risk and issue trackers and implemented a scope change control process.
- Participating in planning committee meetings, delivering executive reporting metrics and dashboards, and providing senior management with immediate program activity snapshots.
- Ensuring accurate, timely communication to stakeholders and appropriate involvement of IT across projects.
- Providing oversight of clinical processes and assisting with change management and adoption at the new facility.
- Formalizing the end-to-end testing methodology for future projects and providing source documents for subsequent deployment initiatives.
- Conducting “trials” of technology at one of the two “live” hospitals and “Workflow Dress Rehearsals” in the new space to ensure the technology was ready and that end users were ready to use it.
Results and Keys to Success
At 7AM on September 29, 2024, the old hospital closed and the doors to the new one opened. The move consisted of 202 patients and was completed in under 10
hours by 56 ambulances, 9 hospital transport vehicles, 1 helicopter, and the help of over 4,000 employees and 12 Impact Advisors project managers. Every patient
had a sending and receiving care team. This was the largest pediatric move ever to occur in one day. On the first day, the new facility saw over 150 patients in the emergency department, performed a catheterization, provided trauma care, and discharged their first patient with minimal issues. By the third day, the go-live Command Center had received only 1,149 incident tickets and most of them were resolved quickly. The health system’s CIO acknowledged the new facility’s opening as “incredible” and “amazing” and stated that it “could not have gone any better.”
The breadth of Impact Advisors’ knowledge of new facility planning, innovative technologies and their integration with Epic, clinical workflow optimization, overall project management, and ability to plan for and adjust quickly to changes were critical to the success of the engagement.