Location: Jefferson City, MO
Client: SSM Health
Size: $6,300,000
THE PROJECT
Guarantee Electrical’s GECO Systems group was an integral part of the integrated project delivery team, led by Alberici Constructors, that completed SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital in Jefferson City. Following Lean construction principles, GECO Systems continued the integrated delivery process begun during the design phase with its three-week/one-week “look-ahead” planning and evidence-based design protocols. In detail, GECO Systems delivered St. Mary’s voice-data communications and security infrastructure using the same preconstruction methods and constraint management process deployed under the Integrated Project Delivery Agreement (IPDA) by General Contractor Alberici, by Guarantee Electrical, by local partner Coastal Electric and by the MEP team throughout the project and across the board. Intended to accelerate construction while simultaneously eliminating waste and encouraging process improvement and innovation, the team discipline imposed by the IPDA contributed to the SSM St. Mary’s project‘s early completion some three months ahead of its original schedule.
OUR APPROACH
GECO Systems brought their expertise to the project’s IPD processes that stress a seamless project team, driven by mutual respect and trust and a shared objective of achieving genuine owner value, rather than the traditional pursuit of self-interested silos of contractual responsibility and economic self-interest. In practice, this meant that as the experts in electrical power and communications systems installation, Guarantee was committed to combining its industry knowledge and capabilities to enable the team to eliminate waste and accelerate project completion at the best possible level of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
OUR WORK
Among the challenges addressed by the Systems team was the diversity of need for specific solutions within each of the specialty centers within the hospital. What was ideal for general medical and surgery, might not be suitable for patients in the behavioral health department or for obstetrics’ Labor, Delivery, Recovery and Postpartum (LDRP) area, the ICU and even an area for patients from the State Dept. of Corrections. Adjustments might involve increasing access control or adding or subtracting wireless access points, or assuring that there were sufficient ports for the numbers of devices that might be required by a given department, with LDRP perhaps the most complex, handling both acute adult and neonatal care. Our aim was to accommodate the parameters called for by SSM’s emphasis, for example, on decentralized nursing, which impacted the configuration and performance of applications like Nurse-Call and involved using wireless RTLS the nurse badging accessory in the Nurse-Call system. Also, because of the IDPA, increased customization was made more possible as scope could be modified more or less as needed over the course of the project to better address the needs of the users of the technologies involved.