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Northeast Georgia Health Systems Saves Big with Construction Site Progress Photography

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Northeast Georgia Health Systems Saves Big with Construction Site Progress Photography

How We Helped This Healthcare Facility Reduce Unforeseen Costs With Photo Progression and Documentation

Northeast Georgia Health Systems (NGHS) has undergone a period of intense growth over the last decade, during which it has built and renovated many hospitals, offices, and health centers. For these projects, NGHS always trusts Multivista’s construction site progress photography services to help stave off unforeseen costs and stay on budget.

About NGHS

The Northeast Georgia Health System is a not-for profit community health system serving more than 1 million people in 18 counties across Northeast Georgia. In the last ten years, NGHS has experienced tremendous growth.

In just one NGHS facility from 2015-2016, more than 30,000 patients received care in the emergency department, 4,100 patients stayed in the hospital’s inpatient units, and 3,200 surgical procedures were performed.

Because NGHS is a not-for-profit health system, these kinds of numbers have a huge impact on their community. In 2015, NGHS generated more than $1.5 billion in revenue for the local and state economies. The health system also provides 12,000 full-time jobs throughout the region.

THE SITUATION

In order to meet the needs of the community, NGHS needed to scale up, build new healthcare facilities, and renovate existing ones.

However, hospitals and health centers are enormously complex construction projects. They involve several different facility types. Details need to be perfect to ensure patient safety. In addition, hospital plans often incorporate unique designs based on the latest healthcare trends.

More than anything, however, hospitals are big. NGHS’s recent expansion into Braselton, Georgia was built on a 119-acre campus.

As a not-for-profit, getting the project done on budget was extremely important to NGHS. Every extra dollar that went into construction was a dollar that wouldn’t go toward serving their community.

PROGRESSION PHOTO DOCUMENTATION: A BUDGET’S BEST FRIEND

In order to minimize the risk of unexpected costs, Northeast Georgia Health System trusts Multivista’s construction site progress photography and documentation services. Multivista has been contracted on five NGHS projects since 2008, including the Braselton project.

In Braselton, NGHS decided to use Multivista’s Interior Exact-Built, Exterior Exact-Built, MEP ExactBuilt, and Interior Progression photo documentation services. Multivista photographers worked on site during every stage of the project, capturing as-built conditions and indexing them to project plans in the Multivista platform for easy access.

These comprehensive professional photographs enabled the facility management team to effectively see behind walls, ceilings, and slabs, eliminating the need for high-cost destructive discovery when unforeseen circumstances arose.

RESULTS

With inspection-grade photo progression, the healthcare facility was able to reduce unforeseen costs of utilities found in slabs. This helped the project management team plan for these utilities during the renovation which helped them save about $100K. In another recent project, Clawson and his team used Multivista MEP Exact-Built visual documentation to see behind the walls of patient rooms. NGHS was upgrading 556 rooms by installing monitors which required wall mounts.

Many healthcare organizations trust Multivista to help keep projects on budget. In fact, Multivista has been contracted to visually document thousands of hospitals and clinics throughout the 75+ global markets it serves.

Multivista saved me approximately $100,000 by enabling me to locate several in-slab utilities. Multivista consistently helps our projects avoid cost overruns that typically come up with renovations. With every new renovation project, I ensure that Multivista is a budgeted component.

With Multivista, we were able to ensure we were not hitting anything critical and installing the mounts in the safest and most cost-effective locations. With this project, Multivista also saved us upwards of $100,000.

Bill Clawson, NGHS Vice President of Facilities