Project Title: Creating a New Medical Office Building Experience

Firm: Lavallee Brensinger Architects

Submitted for Consideration in: Architecture

Client: Reliant Medical Group

Location: Leominster, MA

Project-At-a-Glance:
This new 70,000 SF, medical office building design provides patients access to primary care as well as supporting specialty departments and services. This care-transformation project simultaneously evaluated and changed how the healthcare system delivers care and developed the environment to support it. This rebrand created a modern, state-of-the-art healthcare provider.

Project Narrative:

This Medical Office Building is the result of an ambitious consolidation and replacement project for a large healthcare provider across 9 sites, a total of 450,000 SF, over a 3-year period.  With an expiring lease in 2019, the goal was to simultaneously evaluate and change how they deliver care to their patients and design sites supportive and reflective of this new process.  The second largest in the portfolio, this new construction site is 70,000 SF and provides patients access to primary care needs as well as lab services, radiology, physical therapy, sports medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, and medical and surgical specialties.

Before this project site was selected, the design team created an interactive process, engaging all stakeholders, to develop solutions that enhanced and supported their team-based care model using space prototyping, multi-disciplinary process improvements, volume and evidence-based program analysis, full scale mock ups, staff and patient surveys, and brand development.

To increase patient satisfaction while reducing employee stress and burn out, physician offices were integrated into the clinical workspace to promote communication. Each workspace provides drop-in seats and unassigned Consult Rooms allowing other healthcare professionals such as care coordinators, behavioral health providers, and specialists the ability to see patients and work directly with their primary care teams. 

Reinventing the organization as a state-of-the-art healthcare provider was also vital in the process.  Selection of metal panels for the exterior skin in varying shades of polish set the tone from the exterior that this was not your standard doctors’ office.  The entrance with its three-story white fin, infilled with curtain wall and illuminated at night, created a transparent and welcoming feature.  On the interior, limited accent paint, in varying shades of the organization’s logo, was used to differentiate departments, allowing the artwork to be the focal point of the spaces.