Lean to be Green and Healthy: Sutter Health

4H Performance: Creating Healthy, Healing, High-Performance, Healthcare Facilities

“Lean to be Green and Healthy” is a concept that involves implementing lean thinking to achieve paradigm shift levels of sustainable building performance.  By eliminating wasteful project delivery practices, estimated to be 10% of the capital cost of a project, it is feasible to build green buildings that are more healthy and beautiful for no additional capital cost. 

Sutter Health has adopted Lean Project Delivery

In a paper on “Lean Construction Opportunities Ideas and Practices”, the authors describe a new lean project delivery process called “Integrated Project Delivery” that is being used successfully to deliver better quality, higher performance and more cost effective healthcare projects (Dean Reed and DPR Construction, Inc., 2009).

The following is an excerpt from this speech that was presented to the Cascadia LCI “Introduction To Lean Design” Workshop in Seattle, Washington on September 15, 2008, which highlights lean project delivery for healthcare (refer to http://bit.ly/si9MN1 for the full article).

“The biggest concern in breaking from the past for many owners is how to take the leap from selecting specialty contractors on any other basis than cost... “Real value is not the low bid on a higher cost design. It’s achieving the lowest true cost on the right design.” This can only be achieved through co-creating design with the people who construct it…

Sutter health has adapted the methodology but changed the name to “Target Value Design” (TVD) to emphasize the objective of creating the best design for a facility that can be built for the funds available. Target Value Design requires that the facility owner provide the Integrate Project Delivery team with a description of what is wanted along with the money available for design and construction. The team, with contractors on board who operate in the marketplace and thoroughly understand cost, is challenged to work with the customer to develop the best possible design that can be constructed for the target cost. Cost becomes a design criterion and is considered along with form and function. Cost cannot and must not chase design."

(Dean Reed and DPR Construction, Inc., 2009)

Implementing IPD, and thus eliminating the risk and inefficiencies associated with traditional contracting approaches, liberates time and resources to focus on creating the best design for healthcare facilities. 

If selecting contractors by qualifications is not feasible, an alternative approach to IPD is to implement a highly collaborative integrated design process and work with a value engineering firm to achieve the target value design.  Although not as effective as IPD it can get you some of the way to a leaner more cost effective design.

Next Generation Healthcare Facilities

As we move forward with the next generation of hospitals, it is expected that all healthcare facilities will be delivered using more collaborative approaches. The resulting capital cost savings will fund quality healthy, healing, high-performance, environments for patients and staff.

For more information on “Lean to be Green and Healthy” please visit our website at www.i-designs.ca and download a copy of “The Sustainable Advantage of LEED Facilities” prepared for the Saskatoon Health District.

Committed to creating healthy, healing, high-performance environments that connect people to nature

References:
Dean Reed and DPR Construction, Inc. 2008. Introduction To Lean Design.  Seattle, Washington.