New Cleveland Clinic Facility Coming Along

Interior construction work continues at the new Cleveland Clinic Family Health and Surgery Center off Nagel Road and Just Imagine Drive.

The 180,000 square-foot, $93 million facility is set to open in December. About 120,000 square feet of the building is the Family Health Center, with offices, examining and waiting rooms, and a massive physical therapy center featuring two therapy pools. The rest of the space is for the emergency room and outpatient surgery center. There will also be an outdoor helipad.

Most of the Family Health Center personnel will be coming over from the Clinic's current .

A tour of the site this week showed the intricate dance of different trades that go into creating a medical facility. The work began on the second floor and moved up, project manager Jay Waddell said. The first floor will be finished last, so that finish work won't get damaged by equipment and workers going to the upper floors. It's like when you refinish a wood floor in a room, he said, you work your way out the door.

Designing the building on a computer allowed architect Geoff Aiken to plan exactly where every pipe, every wire, every duct was going to go. It also allowed for many of the components like pipes and ducts to be fabricated off-site, allowing for quicker, easier, and less expensive installation, said Russ Saghy, the Clinic's representative for facilities and construction.

When you have to stop work to make adjustments, that's time and money, Waddell explained.

The surgery center was designed for maximum efficiency and cleanliness. A cleaning and sterilizing area is set between two endoscopy rooms so the soiled equipment can be contained there. The storage and cleaning areas for the operating rooms were placed in the space to create a loop of clean equipment coming into the operating room through its own entrance, used/dirty items going out the door and straight to the cleaning/sterilizing area before being brought back to storage. It's like an assembly line, Saghy said.

The Clinic is going for LEED certification for the facility. Cleanliness during construction is a major part of that, Waddell said. Floors are swept regularly to keep dust from building up. Ductwork openings are tightly covered to keep dust and debris from getting in to help keep future airflow in the building clean. Ninety percent of construction waste is recycled, and they're aiming to get to 95 percent to get another point towards LEED certification.