bnr-flagstaff-health
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Flagstaff Health and Wellness Village

Creating resilient healthcare for a diverse and inclusive community.

Client

  • Northern Arizona Health

Architect

  • HKS

Project Status

  • Ongoing

The Northern Arizona Healthcare (NAH) project in Flagstaff started as design for a replacement hospital and cancer center with ambulatory care which evolved into a comprehensive advisory effort.

Access to healthcare in this mountain region is critical to the community of Flagstaff and surrounding rural areas. The poverty rate is higher in the region than the national average, and the second largest population group is Indigenous. So that their services reach beyond the hospital’s walls and support the vibrant community and economy, NAH’s work is underlined by equity and social justice.

As such, the owner leveraged the new hospital planning efforts as an opportunity to delve deep into resilience for healthcare in the area, and in turn, our role grew from straightforward healthcare systems engineering into an additional advisory role for greenhouse gas inventory, resilience planning and digital innovation planning.

Curing digital pain points

As we embarked on the design of the new hospital, the owner decided they wanted both a new physical footprint and a new digital footprint.

Despite the multi-campus and regional size, we found that the owner didn't have an enterprise system with a consolidated work set for utilities, facilities engineering or purchasing. To solve this challenge, our Innovation Advisory and building technology services teams developed a comprehensive digital strategy, engaging closely with stakeholder groups across clinical, facilities and operations teams to uncover opportunities for technology to enhance patient care, streamline workflows, reduce operating costs and maximize system uptime.

We translated these insights into measurable, actionable use cases that directly supported the hospital’s key business goals, with an emphasis on rethinking data as a strategic asset.

The result — a comprehensive system architecture master plan with a single reporting structure — allows all platforms to talk to each other. Once open for care, the solution will drive patient and family communications, create better staff experiences, offer higher quality patient records and improve wayfinding.

 

Square feet
1.3M
Beds
470

System-wide decarbonization strategies

NAH is committed to being a steward of their resources as a mission to be a partner to their community. The healthcare system is committed to the Health and Human Services’ Climate Pledge as framework to reduce carbon emissions, become more resilient across their portfolio and identify areas they can increase staff and community engagement in response to increasing climate extremes. In addition to consulting and engineering design for the new hospital, and its strategy for sustainability and operational excellence, a separate WSP team is also providing consulting and analysis services for NAH’s compliance with the pledge’s requirements across the network in Flagstaff, Sedona, Verde Valley and some remote areas of Northern Arizona.

Our multidisciplinary team is working with stakeholders to understand operational practices and set goals that will lead to a facility decarbonization strategy for a portfolio of more than 12 assets, including acute care, cancer specialty clinics and ambulatory care centers. Our built ecology engineers, greenhouse gas inventory experts and climate hazard and risk vulnerability scientists have led visioning sessions and gathered baseline data that has resulted in a road map for investment. The road map identifies short-term and long-term needs that will improve care, drive community engagement and reduce dependency on resources and single source supply chains.

The Phase I discovery planning document resilience goals was accepted by executive leadership. Together with NAH’s resilience team, we’re continuing to catalogue greenhouse gas inventory to show measurable improvement towards their commitment to excellence. Ongoing work includes upgrading the existing central utility plant at the Sedona campus, electrifying medical office buildings and exploring the offset of resource consumption at the future Flagstaff hospital. This work is designed to support more resilient operations and a better future for the communities of northern Arizona.

The dual focus on technology upgrades and resilience planning does more than boost efficiency and operational reliability — it turns investment into impact, driving meaningful progress that helps local communities thrive.

Other challenges that we have overcome