Advocate Sherman Hospital’s new greenfield hospital features the largest lake-coupled geothermal system in the world today, serving as a leader in innvoative design and economic and environmental stewardship.

Replacing its 100-year old, land-locked institution in downtown Elgin, the new facility is situated on a former 154 acre farmstead. The 255-bed hospital offers spectacular views across a 15-acre man-made lake to a forest preserve beyond. The lake serves as the energy source for the geothermal system. It is estimated to save 30 to 40% of Sherman’s space conditioning costs and upwards of a million dollars a year, making it one of the most energy efficient healthcare facilities in the world. The system qualified Sherman for a $400,000 grant from the Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation.

The IT and facility staff at Advocate Sherman Hospital embraced the concepts of convergence. Advocate Sherman was interested in deploying only systems with the capability of leveraging the IP network by selecting systems that were IP-enabled. Because of this progressive stance on converged systems, IMEG designed a robust cabling and network infrastructure to support the bandwidth requirements on this approach. The systems included are universal structured cabling system for distribution of voice and data, telecommunication grounding system, distributed wireless antenna system, nurse call system, presentation audio video systems with room combining capabilities, GPS wireless clock system, card access system, infant abduction system, IP based closed circuit television system, distributed analog television and digital satellite television, hospital wide supervised paging, emergency command center with video/teleconference, emergency call stations on site, video intercom system at select doors, interactive patient entertainment system, fire fighter repeater system and medical equipment integration/coordination for the specialized clinical rooms.

The hospital required two demarc locations for redundant incoming service to ensure disaster recovery for the data infrastructure. A large data center, twenty six telecommunications rooms and six ceiling mounted telecom cabinets are located throughout the facility for the distribution of horizontal cabling for IP based systems. In addition to redundant incoming services the hospital has redundant fiber optic cabling to each telecommunications closets as well.