Strategic Master Facility Planning for the Largest Integrated Health System in Illinois

Advocate Health Care (AHC) is the largest integrated health system in the state of Illinois and is recognized as one of the top 10 health systems in the nation. The system offers more than 250 sites of care, including 11 acute care hospitals and an integrated children’s hospital. In a highly competitive and complex Chicago market, AHC continues to face strategic pressures, tightening operating margins, and the need to replace aging facility infrastructure. There is ongoing demand for significant capital investment from each facility’s leadership across all of its hospital campuses to ensure a high level of safety, quality, and efficiency in care delivery.

It is critically important to AHC that all investments are sound and positioned to address competitive pressure, market demand, operating efficiency, and capital realities. AHC has determined that it is essential to base these investments on a well-defined master facility plan and has partnered with ECG’s Facilities and Capital Asset Planning (FCAP) practice to lead a strategic facility master planning process to guide this effort across 6 of its 11 campuses.

Since 2010, ECG’s FCAP experts have worked with site leadership teams from six AHC hospitals, as well as a system-level steering committee. Strategic facility master plans (SFMPs) have been developed for each hospital focused on the unique market, strategic, operational, and facility drivers. With these challenges identified, ECG’s team developed to respond to each environment, while also providing a consistent model of analysis and interpretation to enable system-level investment prioritization decisions.

Key components of ECG’s SFMPs have included:

• Strategic imperatives for each campus, comparing major drivers, opportunities, and threats as a basis for evaluating the prioritization of investment
• Facility condition, site, and functional assessments to evaluate existing hospital infrastructure for continued investment, efficiency of the site layout, and adequacy of existing space and capacity
• A set of SFMP drivers and option evaluation criteria to facilitate option development and evaluation, and to frame the rationale for the recommended plan
• Site development plans illustrating the phased development opportunity of each campus
• Block diagrams to illustrate the various components of the SMFP in the near term – both new space and backfill
• Phasing and cost estimates to help the hospitals and the system understand the timing and financial implications of the recommended plan
• A detailed financial analysis to determine the financial viability and expected performance of each campus’s recommended plan to underpin system priority decisions

ECG’s recommendations from the six SMFPs have either already been implemented or are currently in the process of further development. ECG’s master planning recommendations directly resulted in the following outcomes at AHC campuses over the past six years:

Christ Medical Center

• Opened a 330,000-square-foot, $202 million ambulatory pavilion in March 2014
• Opened a 326,000-square-foot, $222 million inpatient tower in January 2016
• Construction of two new parking ramps and major renovation of select existing spaces at the hospital (in progress)

Illinois Masonic Medical Center

• Opened a 164,000-square-foot, $100 million Center for Advanced Care in April 2015

Good Shepherd Hospital

• Construction of a 375,000-square-foot, $151 million project that involves adding a new patient tower and modernizing the campus (in progress)

Condell Medical Center

• Opened 44,000-square-foot, $36 million outpatient center on the hospital campus in June 2016