Marlborough Hospital Adopts Innovative Build Contract
ARTIST'S RENDERING/COURTESY
The new cancer pavilion at Marlborough Hospital will be the first health-care facility in New England to use an IPD contract, which provides more cost-efficient collaboration between contractors.
Hospitals are always looking to increase innovation and efficiency.
For Marlborough Hospital, that comes right down to the construction process for its new 14,500-square-foot cancer pavilion.
Tocci Building Cos., of Woburn, broke ground on the cancer pavilion earlier this month. And Marlborough Hospital is breaking ground in another way, too - officials there said it will be the first New England health-care facility to be completed after making use of a new form of construction contract called Integrated Project Delivery, or IPD.
Time Is Money
IPD is a new way of doing business in design and construction. It bonds all involved parties in a project's shared guarantees on cost, time and quality goals. Part of this is done by co-location, hospital officials said in a statement. With this strategy, engineers and subcontractors physically work together on site to allow for more convenient - and quicker -collaboration.
IPD is estimated to yield $1.7 million in construction-related cost savings on a $12.7-million project, hospital officials said. Where the savings generally come in, said Laura Handler, Tocci's director of virtual design and construction, is not doing things twice - work doesn't have to be redone when it's too early, for instance. For a complex build like the cancer pavilion, IPD is an ideal match, she said.
And it's a system subcontractors come to like, once they embark on it, she said. "They see the benefits and appreciate being involved earlier."
Handler said IPD is still very new, but big on the West Coast in health care. "There's a lot of buzz in the industry on IPD right now," she said, with close to 100 IPD projects having been completed. She said Marlborough Hospital officials did not need to be sold on the concept. "Once they understood how it aligned all project participants, it just clicked for them," she said." They just got it."
"Each company has been at the table since the first day, all working steadfastly to achieve the shared goal of building an innovative patient-centered facility, said Candra Szymanski, the hospital's chief operating officer, said in a statement. "This experience has verified for me that I will never build a hospital any other way than through IPD."
Tocci is partnering with architects from The S/L/A/M Collaborative of Glastonbury, Conn., for the Marlborough project. Handler said mechanical engineers are the main players in this early stage of construction - foundations are to be laid next month.
But even subcontractors brought into an IPD project on a more traditional contract pick up on the heightened level of cooperation, Handler said, and there is "positive peer pressure," for the team. "It becomes a self-policing system," said Handler. "Once you align teams and motivate them, it's amazing what can happen."
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CLARIFICATION: In the third paragraph of the original version of this story, the project's status as the first that will be completed in New England did not attribute that to officials at Marlborough Hospital.
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