Efforts to Engineer Waste Out of Hospital Project Result in Designing New Hospital Equipment | The Boldt Company

When California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) adds permanent patient lifts to 48 of the 308 medical, surgery and intensive care unit patient rooms at the Cathedral Hill Hospital in San Francisco, they will save money before the hospital is finished. Hospital officials weighed the cost of patient lifts against the cost of nursing injuries associated with moving patients without lifts and decided that adding the lifts was the right thing to do—but it had to be done within the budget.

The Boldt Company, in partnership with Herrero Contractors operating as HerreroBoldt, is charged with managing overall project cost and finding savings wherever possible. According to Boldt’s California Group President Dave Kievet, the HerreroBoldt team realized the impact this decision would have on the overall project and started looking for options. "One of the primary jobs we provide CPMC is to consistently find innovative ways to approach the construction process," Kievet said. "Our crews consider it a personal challenge to continually find ways to reduce cost and still deliver a quality project."

In the project, patient rooms in the intensive care unit ran utilities such as oxygen, medical air, suction, electricity, and data through a clinical boom suspended from the ceiling. Because the clinical booms were supported from the concrete structure above the ceilings, adding another patient lift system to the ceiling was a challenge.

But not for Boldt field engineer Matthew Boersma.

Boersma couldn’t stop thinking about the situation. "Since we were already planning to install the clinical booms, I thought ‘why can’t we just combine the patient lift with the clinical boom,’" Boersma said. In his idea, the articulating arms on the boom could provide the necessary lift and repositioning movement needed for a patient lift but he couldn’t find a suitable product on the market.

After researching several clinical boom providers, Boersma discovered that nothing like this existed. But one company, Amico Corporation, had an existing utility boom with an arm strong enough to handle the patient lift loads. Boersma quickly drew up a sketch and presented his idea to Amico to see if they were interested in helping to develop a new, innovative product. They agreed, and collaborated on optimizing the design through additional sketches and 3D modeling.

"This was a case of the right timing in the right place," said Wayne Benson, (title) Amico Corporation. "Most of our product ideas are developed collaboratively with our customers, and this was an example of designing the best product for a specific application."

It took Amico only two months to complete the engineering and manufacture a prototype. Shortly thereafter, HerreroBoldt crews visited Amico’s manufacturing facility and showroom in Toronto to test the prototype with the CPMC’s Intensive Care Unit clinical nurse, senior project architect and equipment planner. At this time, the Cathedral Hill Hospital was still in the planning phase and teams were using Building Information Modeling (BIM) to generate 3D images of how the boom and lift would work.

"This type of product wasn’t on the market because patient lifts are fairly new products in hospital construction," Benson said. "Based on our initial product tests, nurses and hospital staff were excited about the combined boom and lift."

After testing the newly developed product it proved to be a viable option. The combined boom and lift called the Patient Lift Pendant will cost approximately $19,000 less per room compared to a conventional patient lift. Even though design is still developing on the Cathedral Hill Hospital, Sutter Health has been able to incorporate the innovative Patient Lift Pendant in 48 ICU rooms on another hospital project the Boldt is building.

Amico owns the patent on the new lift unit and significantly enhanced the initial design drawn by Boersma.

"Some may say we should have patented the idea ourselves," Boldt’s Kievet said. "But we’re not in the business of manufacturing hospital equipment, we’re in the business of building hospitals. We knew that in order to save money and time for our client, the best action was to get the product manufactured and installed."

HerreroBoldt’s goal is to build the proposed 920,000-sq.-ft. facility at 14 percent below the cost of current health care market projects of similar size.

###

ABOUT THE BOLDT COMPANY www.boldt.com

The Boldt Company, headquartered in Wisconsin, has 12 offices throughout the United States and is one of the leading sustainable construction services firms in the country. The firm provides professional construction services to customers in a variety of power, industrial, education, healthcare, commercial and renewable energy markets nationwide. The firm has been recognized as one of the safest companies in America.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT
Mary Schmidt
mkschmidt@centurytel.net
920-284-7165
OR
Patrick Casey
Patrick.Casey@Boldt.com
920-225-6159