Looking to provide high-quality care for the residents of western Union County, North Carolina, Atrium Health has broken ground on the new Atrium Health Union West. The campus will include a 150,000 SF hospital and 65,000 SF medical office building when completed in early 2022. The hospital will offer emergency, inpatient, and outpatient care to better support the needs of the community and will ensure residents continue to have local access to world-class patient care.

Once complete, the hospital will feature 36 licensed acute-care beds; eight labor, delivery, recovery and postpartum (LDRP) rooms; and four intensive care unit (ICU) beds. The emergency department will be open 24 hours a day and seven days a week, with an available helipad. There will be three operating rooms, plus one gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy suite and one cesarean delivery (C-section) operating room. Imaging, laboratory, and pharmacy services will also be available on-site.

Atrium, who has not designed and built a greenfield hospital in over 25 years, engaged SSR to provide mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, and technology design services for both the hospital and MOB. The hospital will run on traditional MEP systems. To speed up construction and reduce the budget, prefabricated modular patient rooms were built off-site and transported for installation. A percentage of these rooms were designed to be acuity adaptable to convert from Med Surg to ICU in the future.

The Atrium Union West project reflects how well-developed owner requirements and BIM standards lay the foundation for a successful transition into occupancy and facility management. At each major milestone, the project design team submitted asset management reports from the Building Information Models. Atrium is using these reports to facilitate asset tagging as equipment is installed and asset tracking in their enterprise facility management software.

Running on a concurrent schedule with the main hospital’s, the medical office building is taking COVID-19 learnings into consideration for the tenant fit-out. The project team is working closely with Atrium’s ownership to design flexible space that could be used for overflow patient care (e.g., exam rooms that can convert to patient rooms).