WellStar Paulding Hospital
Replacement Hospital

• Location:
  Hiram, GA
• Size:
  112 bed replacement hospital, 240,000 sf with 75,000 medical office building and 7-story atrium connector
• Construction Cost:
  $85 million
• Status:
  Projected Completion 2014

PerryCrabb Key Personnel:

• Principal: Jim Crabb, PE
• Principal: Jeff Atwater, PE
• Associate: Peter Andersen, PE
• Project Manager: Jason Hales, PE

Owner Reference:

Challenge

In keeping with their mission of improving the health and well-being of the community, WellStar wanted to build a state-of-the-art healthcare center with a focus on safety, lean operation and patient experience in fast-growing Paulding County, Georgia. A lot of healthcare technology and architectural design expertise goes into building a high-quality healthcare facility, and this project clearly needed creative engineering to achieve the highest levels of patient and community safety and an integrated design approach to reduce energy and water consumption. And of course, there’s still a budget to meet.

Solution

Even before a building plan was developed, PerryCrabb’s design process included an exploration of new ideas, unconventional systems and collaborative decision-making. Based on recent experiences around the country, the team decided to provide whole-house power generation on stand-by generators, allowing the facility to run indefinitely during a long-term power outage and ensuring it will be available to serve the community in the aftermath of a natural disaster. To extend runtime and reduce emissions, a bi-fuel system will be used, leveraging the advantages of both on-site diesel fuel and clean-burning natural gas.

In a first-of-its-kind in Georgia, the hospital will be heated and cooled without the use of cooling towers or fossil-fuel boilers. Buried deep under the hospital parking lots will be a borefield that absorbs and stores building heat in the summer and releases it in the winter. In addition to eliminating use of water for cooling and the emissions of fuel-fired boilers for heating, this ground-source heat pump system will offer reduced maintenance and significant annual utility savings. Benefits to the community include zero on-site emissions for heating and cooling and no acoustic pollution. The owner will reap benefits for the life of the building in lower energy, water and maintenance costs. In the words of WellStar’s CEO, “this fits our mission.”

Results

While there are still many details to work out, engineering design that is tightly integrated with the architectural design and some out-of-the-box thinking will help achieve LEED Silver certification and EnergyStar performance. Creative people, technical solutions and innovative design of a sustainable building that meets the client’s goals – that’s PerryCrabb’s mission.