The project: Mayo Clinic Health System (MCHS) replaced its hospital with a seven-level, 70-bed Center for Advanced Medicine and Surgery (CAMS) Patient Tower, the largest construction project in MCHS La Crosse History. The new facility includes:

  • A surgical and procedural floor adjacent to and integrated with the current operating rooms, housing pre-recovery, and post-recovery rooms
  • Endoscopy suites
  • Cardiac catheterization labs and interventional radiology
  • Medical-Surgical units
  • Advanced electronic ICU and Progressive Care Unit
  • Family Birth Center including dedicated labor and delivery, nursery, NICU and C-section suites
  • Unfinished shell space for future growth

Project scope: IMEG coordinated new campus utilities for the building and provided efficient mechanical and electrical systems capable of supporting the various services throughout the building. IMEG also provided energy modeling services and a master plan to guide future campus renovations.

Electrical design highlights: IMEG coordinated new medium voltage utility routings to avoid building footprints, new electrical utility switches and automatic throw-overs, and a new 5kVA double-ended unit substation capable of 4000 amps at 480 volt, 3-phase. MCHS wanted as much as possible connected to the existing under-utilized generator system.

Mechanical design highlights: The new mechanical system includes a 540-ton geothermal central plant expansion to cool the bed tower expansion and heat the entire building. A six-pipe modular chiller is connected to 6 Darcy Solutions geothermal wells. Chilled and heating water from the geothermal central plant serves all the bed tower’s heating, cooling, and reheat needs. To further reduce energy usage, the LDRP and med surg departments are served by a chilled beam system. Two-pipe fan coil units serve all electrical and IT rooms to allow the waste heat to be redistributed to other parts of the building through the geothermal central plant. The bed tower EUI is estimated to be 131 kBtu/SF.

Lighting design highlights: Lighting was designed at 100% LED for interior and exterior complete with an integrated intelligent lighting control network capable of load management and automatic dimming to limit power usage by the lighting system. IMEG worked closely with the architect’s interior design team to select light fixtures to meet decorative intent while maintaining the owner’s concern for energy savings, controllability and overall fixture costs.

Challenge: Sorting and arranging all of the desired electrical functions into specific equipment footprints and dedicated equipment spaces while simultaneously attempting to limiting required square footage. Solution: IMEG worked with the owner and electrical contractor to order electrical equipment as a separate owner purchase package ahead of the 100% construction document deliverable. The contractor was then able to produce shop drawings for IMEG to use as precise footprints for placing all major electrical equipment into rooms ahead of final design documents.

Outcome: MCHS La Crosse has a new, energy-efficient facility providing the surrounding community with state-of-the-art medical and surgical services in support of improved patient outcomes