Canem’s wealth of experience working on regional Acute Healthcare facilities, was instrumental to our project understanding, in particular for the complex hospital technology systems integration.

Extensive user group engagement, including the Patient and Family Advisory Council (PFAC), comprised of past Tom Baker cancer patients and family members, helped shape the design and technology for the project. The engagement shaped the project’s Schedule of Requirements at the RFP stage and was used to further refine the project requirements through additional engagements throughout the design evolution. Navigating design evolution within the constraints of a fixed budget, while upholding our commitment to creating a state-of-the-art cancer treatment and research facility was one of the biggest challenges we overcame for this project.

The importance of early interdisciplinary engagement for key areas in the facility to mitigate construction challenges was crucial. An example is congested corridor ceilings in areas requiring density of mechanical services, including laboratories. Canem employed lean construction practices including Pull Planning to ensure cross-discipline critical path milestones were acknowledged and planned for by all stakeholders.

SYSTEMS INTEGRATION & INTEROPERABILITY

Interoperability and system integration was a key component for this project for not only the patient experience but also to achieve the aggressive energy targets set out for the project. Several use cases were developed during design for implementation during the commissioning of the HTS integration engine. Examples of some of the use cases deployed include using the occupancy information from the lighting management system as an input to the building management system (BMS) to optimize heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC) output and thereby reduce energy use. Another example was to provide an interface between the BMS and the patient environmental controllers such that the patient could control their in-room lighting, temperature level, and the amount of visible light entry from exterior windows.

Systems were designed with redundancy and resilience to ensure operation and maintenance could be achieved without significant disruption to operations. Much of the facility was operating continuously and therefore a centralized uninterruptible power supply (UPS) with 2N redundancy was deployed to ensure continuous operation for these departments. Emergency generation was sized for the entire facility load and designed to provide all facility loads with backup power using six priorities of load management.