For Immediate Release: December 20, 2006
New Facility for Iowa's Orange City Area Health System Incorporates Site Sensitivity, Natural Materials, Daylighting Strategies, Patient Privacy and a Spiritually Uplifting Central Chapel for Rural Healthcare Organization
Minneapolis, MN - The only critical-access hospital/clinic in the country honored with a 2006 Modern Healthcare Honorable Mention; the new 128,000-square-foot hospital and clinic in Orange City, Iowa, seamlessly merges a healing environment with evocative contemporary architecture, providing Orange City Area Health System (OCAHS) with a signature facility from which the organization can serve its rural community. Master planned and designed by HGA Architects and Engineers (HGA), Minneapolis, the facility also retools the healthcare organization for maximum operational efficiency, while providing possibilities for its future expansion as new services develop and the community grows.
Relocating from a 45-year-old landlocked facility constructed during the era of traditional in-patient care, OCAHS administrators required a new building that would meet and adapt to 21st-century methodologies of service and care. "Today, in some respects, we're an ambulatory care center with beds," says Marty Guthmiller, CEO, Orange City Health Area System (OCAHS). "For us, creating the new hospital and clinic was an opportunity to build and shape a 21st-century medical facility."
Along with the opportunity, however, "came tremendous responsibility," Guthmiller adds. "Our new healthcare center will be here for many decades, and is critical to the health and the economic well-being of the region. So it was imperative that we select an architecture firm with that kind of experience. HGA is recognized nationally in healthcare design. So we charged HGA with taking our dreams and making them real."
Sited on a 37-acre green space that includes a pond, prairie grasses and healing gardens, the two-level brick facility features a stunning, sun-filled glass lobby with a water feature, a fireplace, an interior wall of cultured stone and a sloping oak ceiling canopy. At the more private side of the building, the crescent-shaped patient care unit curves to embrace prairie grass and gardens while focusing on the site's retaining pond and rolling farmlands beyond. Book-ending the brick clad patient care unit are two glass forms that enclose lounges for patients and families.
The facility includes a 12,000-square foot surgery and procedure center unique to rural hospitals; a 26,000-square-foot clinic; a 4,000-square-foot emergency department; and a 22,000-square-foot in-patient unit with 25 acute-care beds. At the heart of the facility is a circular chapel whose walls dramatically sweep up toward a circular skylight.
"Marty and his colleagues had so much concern for the patient experience," says Amy Douma, project designer, HGA. "They know their patients personally, so every step along the way they asked questions about how people would feel. We were committed to designing a building that fulfills the functional needs of patient care, as well as the emotional needs of patients and their families."
Design "Pillar" One: Healing Environment. Guthmiller and his colleagues devised three "pillars" of emphasis that not only reflected the OCAHS's intentions and wishes, but also HGA's design which would provide function of the underlying support of the finished facility. "One of the primary 'pillars' of design that we stressed to HGA was our desire for a very overarching concept of the healing environment," Guthmiller says. "That was critical."
Those healing aspects included patient confidentiality and privacy embedded in the design, natural light and water features indoors and healing gardens outdoors, and easy wayfinding throughout the facility. "Patients are already stressed out when they come to us seeking care," Guthmiller explains. "We certainly don't want to increase their anxiety by making it difficult for them to find their way around."
OCAHS also stipulated that the new facility utilize a communications network that would eliminate intrusive overhead paging.
The healing begins at the facility's entrance lobby, with its floor-to-ceiling curtain wall of glass that allows sun to illuminate the space during the day, and is lit from within-like a beacon-at night. Inside the lobby, a rugged wall of cultured stone and a two-story cultured stone fireplace (open to view on both sides) bring the outside in with texture and warmth.
Intersecting with the upper edge of the lobby's stone wall is a canopy of oak beams and panels, adding warmth to the lobby. A water feature at the main entrance greets patients and visitors. In addition, an aviary and aquarium are built into the main lobby as it extends into the clinic waiting area. In the opposite direction, the lobby wall continues to the patient unit and the emergency department.
Great care was taken in the design of the patient rooms and treatment areas. "To OCAHS, a healing environment meant, in part, that the facility have enough space to treat everyone with dignity," Douma explains. "Individual rooms were essential, as each patient's privacy was a critical issue. They also wanted dedicated family spaces that offered contemporary technology where people could get away."
Each of the 25 private patient rooms, located in the softly curving brick "bed unit" at the back of the building, looks out over the prairie, pond and healing gardens. A champagne-colored sunshade over each window filters sunlight entering the room; the form transitions to wood at the interior of the room to create a family seating area under an "indoor trellis."
Like the lobby, the hallway connecting the patient rooms also features an artful oak-beamed ceiling. Behind the cultured-stone columns supporting the curving brick "bed tower" is the glass wall of the facility's dining room.
Design "Pillar" Two: Expandability. Along with the need to create a dignified, healing environment, OCAHS was also concerned with future expandability. The facility is located between Orange City, with a population of approximately 5,500 people, and Alton, population 1,500. While OCAHS primarily serves those two communities, its service area is growing. The clinic currently offices ten family physicians, and OCAHS intends to add one or two more in the near future. Thanks to the new facility, specialty services like the orthopedic group are adding more complete services locally, such as total joint replacement.
During the master-planning phase of the project, HGA worked with Larson Allen's healthcare group and CMBA, a local architectural firm, to investigate functional programming, site selection, planning options, and project costs to help OCAHS construct an efficient facility with growth potential. The 37-acre site ensures "from a physical standpoint that we have the land available to spread out," Guthmiller says. But the architecture itself "is easily expandable," he adds.
"We can grow out in any direction," as the design already defines areas on both the east and west sides of the building where additional construction could occur.
HGA ensured maximum staff efficiency through careful planning for the co-location of such components as the emergency department, patient bedrooms and nursing stations. In addition, HGA assisted OCAHS in "value engineering" the design to lower overall costs and maximize flexibility and operation efficiencies.
"Our team of HGA, OCAHS staff and construction managers worked together to value engineer our facility. As a result, we were able to eliminate several million dollars from the cost of the project," Guthmiller says. "We relied heavily on HGA's experience to advise us on whether, for instance, we could avoid compromising natural light, privacy needs or potential expandability by cutting costs elsewhere."
Design "Pillar" Three: Spirituality. While the new OCAHS facility is a municipal hospital, it serves a Christian community with 13 churches; traditional spiritual values are an important part of the community's history and contemporary life. OCAHS's sense of spirituality infuses the facility through the use of natural materials, sunlight, and outdoor landscaping that incorporates stone walls, trees, flowers and prairie grasses.
But that sense of spirituality is also stunningly portrayed in the cylindrical chapel at the heart of the facility, which Guthmiller calls, "a sanctuary in the middle of the hospital."
From a cultured stone base that slopes downward as one walks into the room, the plaster wall swirls upward until it sweeps into a skylight; the effect is of an unsupported structure that floats toward heaven. Natural light filters throughout the circular room from the skylight. Benches at the back of the room are outfitted with headphones where visitors can relax and listen to pre-recorded sounds from nature.
A faith-based community, the people of Orange City have a genuine appreciation of their natural surroundings, which the chapel demonstrates most clearly. With the use of natural materials and through deference to the site and sensitivity to its topography, Marty, his colleagues and the HGA design team were able reflect the community's values throughout the new facility.
:: Orange City Area Health System
HGA Contact: Julie Luers (612) 758-4000 e-mail JLuers@hga.com
Media Contact: Susan Evans, Evans Larson (612) 338-6999 e-mail susan@evanslarson.com