Progress West Breaks Ground for New Buildings in Early 2009

Growth is the driving force behind a $30 million construction project on the horizon at Progress West HealthCare Center.

In early 2009, the Hospital will begin construction of a new medical office building to meet an increased demand for physician office space, as well as a new BJC data center to accommodate current and future information technology (IT) needs.

The 60,000-square-foot medical office building and 40,000-square-foot data center are expected to be completed in early 2010.

Medical Office Building Part of Larger Plan
John Antes, PWHC president, says the medical office building expansion is part of a larger plan to bring more primary care and specialty physicians to the southern part of St. Charles County.

"The community has responded favorably to having easier access to physicians who are on our campus," says Antes. "We currently have 20,000 square feet of office space leased to multiple specialty practices. Meeting physician and consumer demand for office space will help St. Charles County residents find the specialty health care services they need closer to home in St. Charles County."

The new, two-story medical office building will be connected to the hospital for convenient access to ancillary services. The exterior facade and the use of stone and glass will maintain continuity with the hospital's appearance.

Also, by opening up the new medical office building, says Antes, PWHC will have more flexibility to add other services, such as a cardiac catheterization lab and additional outpatient services, starting in 2010.

Data Center to Meet Current, Future IT Needs
As more and more hospital operations become automated, the demand for IT services across BJC continues to increase, says John Barenkamp, BJC information services (IS) director.

"A new data center will support the additional clinical and administrative systems that are creating a higher demand for IT services," says Barenkamp. "Our goal is for the new data center to be equipped to support our technology requirements for the next 20 years."

BJC's primary data center is now located in the Clayton Avenue Building on the Washington University Medical Center campus. Barenkamp says the new PWHC facility will become BJC's primary data center, as systems are transitioned over time to the new center. The CAB data center will then become a secondary and disaster recovery data center.

Brian Ronning, BJC IS group manager, says the transition should be seamless to BJC users. "Our goal is to transition the applications without disrupting service. Most of the systems in the CAB data center will be replicated to the new data center, which will allow new servers to be installed at the Progress West data center.

The entire transition will take several years, says Ronning, with 100-120 older servers being replaced each year. Ronning, the new data center project manager, will develop the detail plans of the IT systems in the new data center. He says all future projects and new computing equipment also will go to PWHC. "It will be a phased-in approach. The design and plans are developed in a modular approach to allow growth and to allow equipment to be moved to the new data center over time."

The PWHC data center systems will be built with many redundant features  as well -- meaning data wouldn’t be lost in the event of a power outage — making the new center virtually impervious to natural disasters.

"Our customers expect their systems to be 100 percent reliable, and building a new data center allows us to use state-of-the-art redundant mechanical and electrical systems to avoid outages. As a result, the new facility will be hardened against natural disasters, such as tornados or earthquakes."

"Green" Space at Progress West
Ronning is confident the new data center will be able to support BJC -- and do so in an environmentally responsible way -- for the next 20 years.

Both the data center and the medical office building will be built to meet the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, which recognizes green buildings for conserving energy and protecting the environment, says Jaime Kelley, BJC planning, design and construction senior project manager, who's overseeing construction of the data center.

The LEED Green Building Rating System is a nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high-performance green buildings," says Kelley. "A green building is designed, built and maintained in ways that protect and conserve the natural environment and provide healthy living and working environments."

Kelley says green buildings provide multiple benefits for occupants, owners, the public and the environment:

• They conserve water, energy, and other natural resources
• Reduce infrastructure demands for water purification, sewers and treatment facilities, energy generation, distribution and landfill
• Protect public health and environmental quality
• Provide capital savings and productivity gains to benefit the economy

"Our vision is to deliver future energy savings to the data center, as well as the PWHC campus," says Kelley. "As stewards of health, we're also incorporating many other sustainable features in the design that will contribute both to an enhanced indoor environment for employees and to sustaining the eco-system in which we're building." 

Data center facts:

• Servers in the data center: 1,850
• Miles of copper cabling: 71
• Miles of fiber cabling: 10.5
• Data bases: 345
• Terrabytes of data housed in existing data centers today: 842