It’s a well-known maxim that any project hoping for speed, quality, and affordability can only realistically hope to accomplish two of these goals — people call the trio an “unattainable triangle.” In a traditional health care construction project, it is often the case that meeting the rigorous standards essential for medical safety either pushes the budget or stretches the timeline for a new building. Recent innovations in prefabricated modular construction have the potential to upend these assumptions and allow the delivery of patient care units for hospitals and clinics that are engineered to the highest safety and efficiency specifications but simplified enough in manufacturing and assembly to enable rapid delivery at a reasonable cost.
Expanding familiarity with design for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) is prompting many clients to embrace prefabricated modular components for projects, enabling them to rapidly expand capacity while using economies of scale to keep costs in check and standardized production to ensure consistent quality. In a health care setting, where bed capacity limits the number of patients a facility can treat, the extended timelines of traditional building projects are very costly — both to the health of desperate patients in need of care and in lost revenue from patient procedures that cannot be performed without adequate space. When an expanding regional population or a unique health threat increases local demands for care, these institutions are motivated to expand their available beds as quickly as possible to meet the community’s needs.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, HGA, a national multidisciplinary design and engineering firm, collaborated with its longtime partner in building and prefabrication, The Boldt Company, to develop a system of modular hospital units that could be built at a manufacturing site and deployed to a location with astonishing speed while still meeting rigorous safety and efficiency standards. The resulting system was called STAAT Mod (Strategic, Temporary, Acuity-Adaptable Treatment – Modular on Demand), and the first installation of the system — adding 16 private intensive care unit (ICU) airborne infection isolation rooms (AIIR) with the staff and utility areas to support them at Adventist HealthCare Fort Washington Medical Center in Maryland.