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A snapshot in time: BBF construction, May 2014
As anyone who has passed behind the Shapiro Center can see, progress has been steady on the construction of the Brigham Building for the Future (BBF). The site continues to be excavated, and trucks come and go picking up soil and debris. Support beams have been laid down in their place, and construction crews have begun erecting the steel building framework.
In addition to physical preparations for the new building, much planning and collaboration is going on behind the scenes. BWH's Department of Biomedical Engineering, which will celebrate "Healthcare Technology Management Week"-or "Biomed Week" for short-during the week of May 18, has been working closely with Real Estate & Facilities, as well as BWH clinicians to plan for the innovative new addition to BWH's campus, an 11-story, 360,000-square-foot LEED-certified building. With state-of-the-art lab and outpatient clinical space, advanced imaging facilities and underground parking, the building will harness the proximity of research and patient care space, bringing clinical advances more seamlessly from the lab to the bedside and clinic.
"We're working with clinicians to determine the appropriate patient care technology to meet their needs in the new space, from equipment and equipment layout to the configuration of devices," said Kevin Kreitzman, Biomedical Engineering's new assistant director of Clinical Engineering. "It involves a great deal of collaboration to make sure the patient care technology is able to advance and improve patient care and never be a hindrance to our care providers or patients. Spending time with clinical users helps give us a deeper understanding of what they need."
Kreitzman says one major difference between the BBF and other projects is scale. The majority of the department's projects involve renovations or upgrades to existing buildings or devices; but this time, similar to planning for the opening of the Shapiro Center in 2008, the workspace is an entirely new building.
"Due to the nature of the BBF, it's critical for Biomedical Engineering staff and others working on the project to be future-minded when they are thinking about its infrastructure and technology," said Kreitzman.
"We want to make sure what we're purchasing now is consistent with future systems and processes," he added. "We need to be able to seamlessly send patient care data from medical devices to Epic software, auto-streaming information from patient monitors to electronic records."