SOUTHFIELD — Only a few days remain to sign up for the Engineering Society of Detroit’s exclusive, members-only tour of the new, $78 million Detroit Medical Center Heart Hospital.
The tour is Wednesday, March 4 at 2 p.m.
The tour will feature representatives of both the DMC and of Harley Ellis Devereaux, which was the designer of the 216,000-square-foot Cardiovascular Institute.
Peyman Ramin, lead electrical engineer on the project for Harley Ellis Devereaux, and Dale Clark, lead mechanical engineer, will be along for the tour, pointing out high-tech features of the building’s design.
The tour is $25 for ESD members. Or, join ESD for $75 (a 25 percent discount) and take the tour for free. (This offer is good for new, first-time members only.)
Register online at this link or call (248) 353-0735, ext. 222 to register by phone. For questions, please contact Matt Roush at mroush@esd.org.
According to Harley Ellis Devereaux, the heart hospital has become the new gateway to the Detroit Medical Center, consolidating cardiac services into one cohesive facility and solving engineering challenges throughout the campus.
The siting of the new building required relocation of major utility services and the demolition of an existing 10-story international housing building and an 800-car parking structure. The demolition of these structures created the opportunity to build an 1,800-car parking structure to address badly needed parking on campus as well as the new hospital. The newly configured site revealed a prominent view of the Detroit skyline, once blocked by the larger buildings. Additionally, newly open space provided access to Brush Park, which had been largely inaccessible and contained various building support equipment and outdoor generators.
A variety of engineering challenges existed across the campus, in addition to addressing utility needs for the new heart hospital. The urban site made it challenging to install building support service equipment such as emergency generators, a fire pump and a 40,000-gallon water tank fire suppression backup system that is code-mandated for the hospital. One outdoor generator located in Brush Park and two generators land locked in the basement of Children’s Hospital needed to be addressed with no physical space to place new equipment. The primary electrical services to the campus were at capacity and two new DTE primary services had to be brought to the site to accommodate the new hospital, the existing Children’s Hospital and also the future Children’s Hospital North Tower addition.
Harley Ellis Devereaux was commissioned to solve these campus engineering issues, designing an Energy Center within the new 1,800-car parking structure. This building had to be engineered to meet seismic requirements because it served critical services in multiple hospitals. The Energy Center was designed to house four 1,500-kilowatt generators connected to a paralleling gear and normal double ended power primary equipment with automatic transfer. In addition, the fire protection tank and fire pump was installed in the Energy Center, removing it from Brush Park. Special attention had to be made to generator stacks and the neighboring facilities air intakes and generator exhaust was channeled through an equipment corridor to mitigate sound to the neighboring park.
The entire emergency system in Children’s Hospital was reworked as part of this project. System monitoring and controls were incorporated into the design so the systems are visible from multiple locations on campus, enabling DMC to operate the heart hospital with no additional staff.
Within patient spaces, air handling systems for the CVI have ultraviolet lighting to reduce the possibility of contagions. Air systems for the surgery area have HEPA filtration for ultra clean air. Equipment cooling for the catheterization labs is accomplished by an energy efficient heat pump system with winter free cooling at the cooling tower. Building heating is accomplished by using Detroit Thermal Steam and chilled water is produced by new variable frequency drive chillers.
By consolidating cardiac services from across the campus into a dedicated center of excellence, time from EMS pick up to balloon was reduced by 35 percent. Harley Ellis Devereaux’s medical planners created a unique layout for the procedure areas, prep and recovery spaces, abandoning the traditional racetrack design and creating a linear path for cellular design that focuses on breaking down operations and space into smaller increments that contain prep, procedure and recovery spaces within a specific cell. The ultimate benefit is a reduction in the number of units walked resulting in more efficient use of time. The travel units for patients were reduced by 40 percent, primary nursing staff walking units were reduced by 25 percent, and physician walking units were reduced by 20 percent.
DMC wanted to provide a welcoming and accommodating entry feature that would allow families to feel that they were being taken care of while their loved ones were undergoing a procedure. The solution was a full service concierge desk in the atrium lobby to service guests similar to a hotel, as well as providing a greeter directly adjacent to the parking bridge entrance.
Also, 90 percent of interior finishes in the building were manufactured in the United States, and the building uses natural woods, natural stone and warm earth tones in combination with multiple levels of lighting, all based on evidence about how surroundings affect health and healing.
Staff have the convenience of dual circulation through a restricted corridor and a large, shared clean holding space, minimizing time for retrieval of materials and specialty equipment.
“Advances in technology now enable us to treat many different heart problems in a minimally invasive way for faster recovery and shorter hospital stays,” said Theodore L. Schreiber, M.D., president of the DMC Cardiovascular Institute and DMC Heart Hospital. “With the launch of this world-class facility, designed and dedicated for the care of heart patients with a focus on minimally invasive techniques, DMC is taking another major step toward becoming an internationally-recognized center of excellence in cardiovascular medicine.”
The hospital features six new catheterization laboratories, four new operating rooms, clinics for heart failure treatment, heart valve replacement and atrial fibrillation, and areas for echocardiography, stress testing and cardiac imaging.
Today’s DMC Heart Hospital…
* Is home to Cardio Team One, where America’s best interventional cardiologists are on site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Cardio Team One has cut the life-saving treatment time for Emergency Room patients with suspected heart attacks door to balloon (intervention to open blocked arteries) treatment time approximately in half. DMC door to balloon times consistently average 45 minutes, unlike the 90 minute national average.
* Offers support and collaboration with the DMC Emergency Departments, including the only Senior ER in the U.S. which will be staffed by board-certified emergency physicians and board-certified geriatricians on the front lines treating patients in collaborating in evaluating and treating the older adult.
* Has a ground-breaking medical technology designed to protect patients with diabetes-related arterial disease (plaque preventing blood flow to limbs) from the risk of foot or leg amputation. The innovative new procedure — one of the first of its kind to be used in the country and the first in Southeastern Michigan — is aimed at greatly reducing the need for lower-limb amputations by restoring interrupted blood-flow to disease-damaged arteries.
* Conducted the nation’s first artery-repair procedure using a new high-tech, catheter-delivered tool designed to pump up to four liters of blood per minute through a patient’s circulatory system. The new device allows the heart to rest while repairs are made to damaged arteries. The breakthrough “Impella CP” procedure is the first ever conducted in North America and to date, DMC has done more impella procedures than anywhere else in the world.