Tens of thousands of people. Nearly 10 years of planning. And as of October 30, 310 patients were the first to be welcomed for care in Penn Medicine’s new Pavilion at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP). The list of superlatives we can boast in this effort is already long, from the biggest concrete pour in the history of Philadelphia, to the biggest capital project in Penn’s history, to the largest LEED Gold-certified health care building anywhere.
I want to celebrate one thing in particular: This was one of the most collaborative projects we’ve ever taken on, from the blueprint to the bedside.
From the start, the Pavilion’s design and planning came together under the integrated project delivery team, PennFIRST, which wasn’t just Penn Medicine employees, but also our staff from our design, engineering, construction, and architecture firms, coming together as a unified team of hundreds of experts working side by side. This collaboration drove efficiency, with innovations such as off-site manufacturing of many building components — even the bathrooms. And just as importantly, it drove creativity and innovation by ensuring all of our great minds worked shoulder-to-shoulder as the building took shape.
Countless individuals brought their unique expertise to the Pavilion, every step of the way. Some of them may be familiar names to our team by now, like Kathy Gallagher, MS, BSN, and Kate Newcomb, MSN, RN, MSW, who left bedside nursing to join the PennFIRST team at its inception to unite clinical expertise and insights with design and construction plans. They are among thousands of individuals from across this organization who have made their mark in ways large and small. Hundreds of nurses, doctors, patient transporters, pharmacists, and more toured or tested their work activities in full-scale mockups of the building’s spaces — and their feedback was so valuable that it led to redesigning the building.
Thanks to the collaboration of designers and engineers with our front-line staff, the Pavilion is built for the future of care in ways that prioritize both employee satisfaction and the patient experience. Even fine details such as the fact that patient rooms have electronic privacy glass facing the hallway and remote-adjustable external window shades, come back to that idea. Not only are the curtainless windows easier to clean for infection control, but they simplify tasks for staff, who won’t be called in to adjust them. Patients, meanwhile, get more control over their environment in a time when their autonomy is often strained — they can adjust the privacy glass, the shades, and even the lights and thermostat, from their bedside.
The people whose creativity and insight have made the Pavilion so welcoming span every possible discipline, all the facets of our work that drive high-quality care for patients. Martine Kersaint, MBA, and the Clinical Engineering team tested every single ventilator, EKG, and other piece of clinical equipment before it entered the building. Teams of sterile processing technicians like Angelica McCoy got a head start working at a new building of their own earlier this year, with the new Interventional Support Center, where surgical instruments for the Pavilion and other Penn Medicine hospitals are sterilized in a more spacious and efficient environment. Andrea Blount, RN, MPH, and the HUP Patient Education Specialist team ensured that communication to patients would be clear, from wayfinding signs across the HUP campus to instructions on using new patient room technologies.
By collaborating, whether within teams or across campuses, we’ve made the Pavilion an ideal environment for our patients and for our staff. The Information Services teams who developed IRIS, the 75-inch screen and digital whiteboard in each patient room, for instance, collaborated with Chester County Hospital to pilot aspects of this technology in its own new facilities that opened in 2020. Now, for patients, clinical teams, and families, IRIS is so much more than just a big screen — it’s a place for collaboration. Clinicians now project patients’ radiology scans onto the screen and can discuss treatment plans together with patients and their families.
We’ve often described the Pavilion as a beacon, lighting the way to the future of advanced patient care. That light comes from within all of us, bringing our excellence together toward a shared goal. Now that the Pavilion is open, the time has come to truly shine.