Kaiser Permanente Vacaville Campus

Kaiser Permanente’s Vacaville Medical Center is a campus development including a 174-bed, 340,000 square-foot, four-story hospital; a 219,000 square-foot medical office building; and central utility plant. By taking full advantage of resources from previous template projects, the project team met a compressed project timeline by significantly decreasing the time needed for design and permitting approvals.

The Kaiser Permanente Vacaville Medical Center is the fourth facility to be completed with Kaiser Permanente’s new template design. This flexible, evolving template offers both the cost savings resulting from standardization and builds on lessons learned from the first three medical centers, which share an identical footprint and key program components. The template outlines common structural and building systems, planning concepts, floor plans, equipment, furnishings and construction techniques adaptable to a variety of site conditions.

The goal of the template program is not exact repetition, but adaption and evolution. Vacaville differed from the previous sites in that the medical center would need to be oriented with an existing Medical Office Building (MOB) and Central Utility Plant (CUP). To determine how Vacaville would relate to the existing facilities, Rudolph and Sletten evaluated cost impacts, utility runs and access points in ongoing open dialogue helping the team concluded the most cost efficient way of routing.

During construction, the Kaiser Permanente team, Rudolph and Sletten, Stantec Architecture and Arup engineers made themselves accessible to one another for ease of communication. By being on site, the team could see issues first-hand on a moments notice, allowing quick responses.

The team also visited similar facilities in an advanced stage of construction. The visits were critical to evaluating cost and constructibility issues and to identify alternate approaches. Teamwork through the design process not only resulted in an efficient and safe hospital design, it sped the delivery of each facility and significantly reduced construction costs.

Rudolph and Sletten led a Quality Management Team that conducted weekly quality walks of the job site with extensive review of mockups and first-in-place installations. Information gathered in daily reviews was evaluated by team members on a weekly basis. Rudolph and Sletten also conducted lengthy pre-installation conferences, including a multi-hour group review of construction documents and design details, and establishing expectations. Foremen and work crews were included in these meetings so that communication could be taken in first hand.

Vacaville provides an outstanding industry model of cost-effective response to California’s challenging new seismic requirements. Kaiser Permanente developed a safe and efficient design with ongoing benefits in terms of medical planning, detailing and constructibility. The project team took advantage of lessons learned on previous Kaiser Permanente projects and offers its own lessons to future template projects. Kaiser Permanente’s Vacaville Hospital serves as a critical bridge between the first and second generation of hospitals, fine tuning not only design and construction methods but also coordination and communication protocols.