A 483,000-sq-ft hospital provides a critical resource for families in Lehi, Utah, featuring a wide range of services such as behavioral health, newborn intensive care, sleep medicine, infusion therapy and physical therapy, and it is designed in a way that promotes better health outcomes.

This is Primary Children’s Hospital’s second major campus; its first is located in Salt Lake City.

“Intermountain Health is giving themselves room to grow here in Lehi, with lots more acreage on site that they can use for other important things as needs arise,” says Gary Krutsch, project manager at Jacobsen Construction.

Scope of work on this nearly 3.5-year-long, $222-million project included construction of an outpatient center and a trauma center, along with a five-story, 66-bed hospital building, a three-story medical office building and a stand-alone central utility plant.

“I think the most daunting challenge was the number of participating shareholders in the programming, design and construction phases,” says Jeffrey Pinegar, principal at VCBO Architecture. “We began the design process with visioning exercises, and the invitee list to those meetings included 134 folks representing all aspects of the project. Over the span of 10 very intense sessions spaced out over 10 months, our group was able to direct and elicit ideas, needs and wants from these 134 to come up with a comprehensive design that helps to meet the needs of the children, families and caregivers for whom this facility was constructed.”

The hospital campus includes 66 inpatient beds and 35 outpatient specialty clinics, with one floor fully dedicated to behavioral health.
Photo courtesy of Jacobsen Construction

The team optimized views of surrounding landscapes and provided easy access to daylight and healing outdoor spaces designed to encourage movement, exploration and relaxation. In the infusion clinic, for example, a private indoor-outdoor balcony allows children with compromised immune systems to have a private outdoor area without risking infection.

The hospital’s design focused on the journey pediatric patients take during their visit and includes such elements as murals along the walls and nurse stations as well as colored glass and lighting, with “positive distraction design principles” influencing these choices.

“What really stands out to me is the glass wave along the front of the building. It’s an absolutely beautiful feature,” Krutsch says.

But this element also posed a challenge early in the design. In a specific spot that featured multiple layers of glass exterior, there was the potential for intense solar heat buildup as those layers would create a multiplier effect. Recognizing this hazard, the team examined several possible solutions before choosing to add a solar trellis to refract sunlight to prevent such buildup.

Supply chain and worker shortages pushed the project team to find schedule efficiencies wherever possible.

“This project was constructed during peak periods of the COVID-19 pandemic, which presented unique challenges. We took a lot of precautions, meaning sometimes whole teams were away from the jobsite for a couple weeks,” says Blake Court, vice president and project executive at Jacobsen Construction. “During this period, material delivery dates slipped because of several factors affecting supply chains. Our team made several big adjustments to make up for any lost time and still deliver the completed project when we needed to and in the way we needed to.”

Before the entire team mobilized, crews completed excavation and moved all rebar and anchor bolt material on site. This ensured zero wasted time when transitioning to foundation work.

To avoid subcontractor mobilization bottlenecks, Jacobsen self-performed about $48.1 million in work, including concrete, rough carpentry, flooring finishes and fire caulking. Crews placed 17,100 cu yd of concrete across 176 placements, each ranging from 2 cu yd to 440 cu yd.

Design details throughout the facility help distract and delight children during what can often be anxiety-filled visits.
Photo courtesy of Jacobsen Construction

Avoiding rework was another vital element in ensuring that the schedule would remain intact. To that end, crews achieved 100% installation accuracy on steel anchor bolts across the project.

Inside the diagnostic imaging spaces, equipment installation required extremely strict tolerances to ensure imaging technology would provide accurate diagnoses. The team utilized advanced jobsite mapping tools to meet or beat specified equipment tolerances.

“Some of the most challenging projects to complete are hospitals, which are incredibly complex and use systems that no other type of building uses. These systems directly affect patient care and need to work correctly to help patients recover—any errors would be life-changing,” Court says.

Prefabrication helped speed installation and cut costs in multiple areas. Four exterior work scopes were combined into one with the prefabricated insulated metal panel wall systems.

Prefabricated patient room headwalls allowed for a plug-and-play approach during installation, and each of these self-contained systems—featuring medical gas lines, patient monitoring technology as well as crucial mechanical and electrical systems—was manufactured off site.

Value engineering to reconceptualize multiple exterior canopies also saved the client more than $1 million.

“This project was quite complex and had a lot of moving parts and a lot of coordination required between many groups on the jobsite,” Court continues. “We put significant focus on the quality and completeness of every building system and making sure they were patient-ready on Day 1.”

Collectively, the project team oversaw 515 owner-initiated change orders throughout construction, many within the final few months of work.

“Some of the biggest challenges in the project were in the finishing stages,” Krutsch adds. “Because the process for starting up the hospital was extensive, we had a significant amount of overlap between construction work and furnishing, equipment setup and staff training.”

Open communication and coordination ensured that the facility was ready to see its first few patients in late December 2023, which was a priority for the client so the facility could meet a window under a time-sensitive federal program that would provide significant savings on hospital pharmaceutical supplies. All work was completed on time and within budget in January 2024.

“One of the things that was most important for our project team was to understand what this meant for the community. It’s something that we focused on very early on and reemphasized it during the construction of the facility,” Court says. “Many of the craftworkers on this project live near Lehi, and this will become their Primary Children’s Hospital that they will go to. We knew that, at the end of it, this would be a facility that would make a difference in people’s lives, most especially for those who live in that area.”