Children’s Hospital Colorado North Campus Expansion

Children’s Hospital Colorado (CHCO)’s North Campus Expansion in Broomfield significantly increased the hospital’s footprint and multi-specialty pediatric services. Growing from a 47,000-square-foot specialty clinic to a 236,000-square-foot pediatric hospital, the North Campus offers several services to more than 275,000 patients annually:

• Urgent care
• 24/7 emergency care
• Inpatient and outpatient care
• Surgery services
• Pediatric orthopedics and sports medicine
• Cancer care with infusion services
• Behavioral health services
• Ophthalmology
• Neurology
• Cardiology
• ENT
• Urology
• Dentistry
• Laboratory and imaging services

The culture of Children’s Hospital Colorado is based on the values of humble expertise, generous service, and boundless creativity. At the onset of the visioning process, these values were identified as guiding pillars in the design and decision-making, as were the organization’s brand standards.

These standards were incorporated into the design to promote community education, patient-provider communication, and a sense of comfort and familiarity. The team put an emphasis on family-focused clinical spaces, efficient patient and provider flows, clear wayfinding and branded signage, telehealth capabilities, and engaging artwork and color suitable for pediatric patients. Inspired by Colorado’s great outdoors, each floor within the hospital features a unique color and animal theme, which functions as a wayfinding tool to help visitors of any age navigate the facility.

CHCO’s design and construction process supports project delivery in a way that is most beneficial to all parties—including the delivery of the best possible care and services to patients. On this project, CHCO assembled a team of people and organizations who could best realize the vision of hospital leadership through an Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) method.

IPD involves a robust onboarding process and is designed to eliminate conflict between the parties by creating “project-first thinking.” It starts at the individual level. Understanding different behaviors and how they affect team dynamics is key to achieving a win-win for everyone involved.

On this project, the IPD team consisted of 10 parties who co-located in our offices toward the beginning of the project and moved to the construction site later on. The team developed an onboarding video for new team members about open communication and how every team member could engage and contribute to consistent project improvement.