FEATURED PROJECT
Health Care Built For This Century
$762 million plan for facility has long-range view
By Ryan Alessi – Lexington Herald-Leader
Dixon Electrical Systems is the Electrical, Fire, Life Safety and Building Automation Systems contractor on one of the largest, most innovative hospital construction projects in the world.
The plan for the new $762 million University of Kentucky Albert B. Chandler Hospital that towers over South Limestone is for it to remain relevant for a century - an ambitious long-range view.
Rapid technological changes in medicine these days can make a new hospital seem dated as soon as it opens. But UK has built flexibility into its construction to allow for future needs in medical care.
"It was set up to be a 100-year building," said Dr. Michael Karpf, UK's executive vice president for health affairs, after a recent tour of the structure.
Dr. Michael Karpf, executive vice president for health affairs at the University of Kentucky, visited one of the mock-up patient rooms for the new UK Albert B. Chandler Hospital.
The 12 floors are designed in 30-square-foot modular grids, which can be reconfigured easily, he said.
The 15 feet between each floor will allow for high ceilings - about 9-feet high to start - that can be raised to accommodate future technology. And large patient rooms come with extra-large doorways so clinicians may wheel in just about any device needed. "It's much safer to bring the equipment to a patient than bring the patient to the equipment," Karpf said.
The building is one of the most ambitious and expensive that UK has ever undertaken. Constructing the hospital's 12 stories and outfitting the first six floors will cost $532 million. Finishing the upper 600,000 square feet by 2020 will cost an additional $230 million in today's dollars, Karpf said. The hospital, when it opens in sections throughout the decade of the 2010's, will start out with some key innovations that Karpf said will make it one of the most impressive collections of advances in medical design in the country.
Take a virtual tour of the new, upcoming UK Albert B. Chandler Hospital
