UC San Diego Health in La Jolla, Calif., UMass Memorial Health Care in Worcester, Mass., and Pa.-based Lancaster General Hospital received this year’s Vista Awards, presented by the American Society for Health Care Engineering (ASHE) of the American Hospital Association.

The Vista Awards recognize significant collaboration in creating optimal health care environments. Each winning team has exemplified outstanding teamwork in all stages of their respective health care projects, from pre-planning to the final reveal. The hospitals won in the categories of best new construction, renovation and infrastructure, respectively.

The awards were presented at the 2019 International Summit & Technical Exhibition on Health Care Planning, Design & Construction (PDC Summit) on Monday, March 18,  in Phoenix. The three awards are as follows:

New Construction
UC San Diego Jacobs Medical Center, UC San Diego Health
La Jolla, Calif.

UC San Diego Health embarked on a journey to transform what was once a community hospital (Thornton Hospital) into a world-class academic medical center reflective of UC San Diego Health’s vision “to create a healthier world–one life at a time–through new science, new medicine and new cures.” In support of that objective and despite many challenges, the Project Team adhered to its mission to “Transform People, Process & Place.”

With consumerism and new patient expectations sweeping the health care field, UC San Diego Health completely recalibrated its delivery model within a modern and restorative facility designed entirely around the needs of patients. The result is a new standard of care for patients and families, as well as a workplace designed and engineered to address every potential scenario for medical staff.

Renovation
MC 2020 Memorial Campus Refresh, UMass Memorial Health Care
Worcester, Mass.

With a goal of being “The best place to give care and the best place to get care,” UMass Memorial Health Care executive leadership set out to explore, plan and implement transformative upgrades and improvements at the flagship academic medical center’s Memorial and University Hospital campuses. With this crucial decision out of the way,

UMass established a “focus on establishing key goals encompassing four categories: Our Patients, Our People, Our Discoveries, and Our Long-Term Financial Health.” The resulting MC2020 modernization project sought to increase the number of private patient beds, transition nurses stations into collaborative team stations, increase learning and discovery space at the Memorial Campus, and in general, create a more standardized person-centered experience.

Infrastructure
Lancaster General Hospital Energy Center, Lancaster General Hospital
Lancaster, Pa.

To fulfill the growing needs from their surrounding community, Lancaster General Hospital embarked in 2013 on a comprehensive facilities and capabilities expansion. From the onset of planning, it was critical to incorporate the broader vision to be “The Light on the Hill,” meaning that the hospital could serve as a fully functioning sanctuary in the event of any natural disaster or power interruption for as prolonged a period of time as may be necessary.

With this in mind, the encompassing project goals were to design infrastructure needs for steam, chilled water and normal and emergency power in support, engineer innovative solutions to ensure resilient and redundant power needs, ensure installation of new infrastructure without any disruption, and to deliver the increased capacity needs, while simultaneously reducing overall costs of operations.