The Vancouver Clinic: Vancouver, Washington

Otak CPM served as Owner’s Representative for the Vancouver Clinic in the development of their three-site expansion project. In expanding to the Ridgefield, Camas and Salmon Creek locations, the Vancouver Clinic’s ability to provide healthcare services grows for communities across Southwest Washington.

Adding a total of over 121,000 square-feet in medical office clinic space, the three-pronged project enhances a number of services:

• Ambulatory surgery
• Family and internal medicine
• Pediatrics
• Urgent care
• Ophthalmology
• Medical imaging
• Laboratory services

These facilities were designed concurrently utilizing a LEAN Integrated Design approach, led by ZGF Architects and in partnership with Anderson Construction. The design experiences for the clinics as well as the ambulatory surgical center, were augmented by full-scale mock-ups to confirm functionality. This approach leveraged the experiences of clinical staff and medical consultants to prioritize patient care with optimal clinic workflows.

Ridgefield Clinic Expansion

As the first site of the Vancouver Clinic project, the Ridgefield expansion is a 15,400 square-foot medical facility that provides family medicine, urgent care, radiology, and phlebotomy laboratory services. The project required significant community engagement and coordination between the City of Ridgefield, neighboring members, and WSDOT in order to solve complex easement issues and evolving land use conditions that arose during the entitlement process.

Responsible for navigating stakeholder approvals, Otak CPM successfully established a reporting/coordination cadence that included Vancouver Clinics’ executive sponsorship team and two physician board structures. That governance process established efficient approvals while maintaining a higher degree of integration and coordination with clinical department heads and Vancouver Clinic’s own performance improvement leadership team.

The project was completed in June 2019, three weeks ahead of schedule and approximately $3M under total project budget. This extra time and resources would allow for Vancouver Clinic to practice their new patient care flow patterns prior to the clinic opening. Included in the total project budget savings was owner contingency for the project which was not touched due to due to the early engagement with program stakeholders, efficient approval process, and integrity of the design for the final project.

Camas Expansion

The second expansion site is a new 26,400 square-foot, two-story clinic in the Columbia Palisades development bordering east Vancouver and Camas, Washington. The project was delivered five weeks ahead of schedule and below budget while also adding the conversion of two exam rooms to have negative pressurization, necessary for treating infectious diseases.

The project delivery also required compressing the schedule to include owner move-in to be concurrent with project completion, made achievable by the project team’s very high trust and transparency culture, particularly amid Covid-19 precautions. The Vancouver Clinic executive sponsors requested both these additions to support clinic services provided in the community with the cold/flu, and uncertain Covid-19 season on the horizon.

This was the first building in the redevelopment of the old Fisher’s Quarry site, which created the first challenge. There were no data lines within a quarter mile of the jobsite, and the site was pre-loaded with a huge pile of dirt to “weight” the site and stabilize the ground beneath the new building. Under the newly stabilized soil was a layer of solid rock.

Salmon Creek Expansion

Otak CPM provided owner representative services through the completion of the design and construction documents, as well as a complicated land use and entitlement process and project permitting. Additionally, the owner was assisted with coordination and support during a lengthy Washington state certificate of need process, initially applying for exemption, and later with the full certificate of need application process.

Due to unforeseen delays with the jurisdiction, Otak CPM worked tirelessly with industry partners to iterate multiple scenarios for the project to move forward. Ultimately, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, our client was forced to change project delivery methods and the building construction phase was completed in partnership with Pacific Medical Buildings as a turn-key, build to suit project. Otak CPM is still serving Vancouver Clinic in an advisory capacity through the final completion of this last expansion project.