St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center

St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center is a Boston University teaching hospital and the tertiary care center for the Steward Health Care system. They were looking to add 16 beds to their medical-surgical unit and Steward wanted to find a way to standardize their spaces going forward. Using DIRTT to create their headwall assemblies allowed them to check two very important boxes. Read on for more.

First, speed. When patient rooms aren’t in use, the lost revenue can reach up to $15,000 a day. On this project, the cost of DIRTT’s headwall assemblies was within 1% of other considered solutions, but they shaved valuable time off the schedule. Assembled headwalls arrive pre-wired with all levels of power, pre-piped with flexible medical gas lines, and installed in a fraction of the time compared to conventional construction schedules.

Second, resilience and flexibility. Headwalls are filled with a wide variety of sophisticated clinical equipment. Being able to easily access, repair, and update that equipment brings substantial operational maintenance savings. DIRTT wall panels remove quickly offering easy access to the in-wall headwall components. This allows St. Elizabeth’s to easily add utilities or new technology, change acuity levels, and address ongoing maintenance issues. And they can do it in just a few hours instead of having to shut down the room or whole unit for days.

The result was an accessible, responsive, standardized solution that can easily be repeated on any of their future projects.