Insights & Solutions

The 34-bed Holyoke Center for Behavioral Health at Holyoke Medical Center, which opened in early 2021, offers inpatient and outpatient services along with hybrid programs for adults with mental health and substance abuse issues. Because of our extensive expertise and experience meeting the unique requirements of behavioral health applications, Unicel Architectural was contracted to furnish nearly 70 window units on two different floors.

The 130-year-old Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) Somerville Campus is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School (HMS) north of Boston offering urgent care, primary care, women’s health, and inpatient psychiatry services for children and youth.

When it embarked on a significant renovation of two floors to make them more suitable for behavioral health treatments, project architect Lavallee Brensinger Architects brought in Unicel Architectural to help upgrade the facility’s legacy window system. Unicel Architectural was contracted to furnish nearly 40 window units, including spandrel panels and its award-winning, AAMA 501.8 certified Vision Control for Behavioral Health for exterior and interior applications.

The Big Lots Behavioral Health Pavilion at Nationwide Children’s Hospital is housed in a 386,000 square foot glass building featuring integrated inpatient and outpatient services. Unicel Architectural, which has a strong track record working with behavioral health centers, was asked to deliver an integrated louvers product. The pavilion now now boasts more than 300 exterior Vision Control units with vertical louvers and glass stops in glossy white and custom gray, each perfectly suited to the architect’s specifications, along with 120 interior Vision Control units and low-profile door trims with horizontal louvers to provide much-needed privacy and sound dampening.

Henry Ford Macomb will be expanding its services, which will include approximately 225,000 square feet, 160 beds, patient tower addition on the north side of its campus. A two-story bridge will connect the new tower to the existing hospital. The project will also include an 11,600-square-foot expansion of the hospital’s power plant and provide enhanced infrastructure to service the new tower and existing hospital house. Additional parking and other site improvements are included to provide better and safer navigation of the site. The overall project in total is approximately 350,000 square feet.

Jacobs Medical Center on University of California, San Diego’s (UCSD) east campus in La Jolla is located in the heart of the area’s nexus of biomedical research centers and hospitals. The 10-story, 509,500-square-foot facility is built next to UCSD’s existing Thornton Hospital and connects on multiple floors. It includes a bone marrow transplant unit, 14 operating rooms, labor and delivery unit, NICU and birthing center, and a medical education center with three theaters. Amenities include a chapel, courtyard, garden, and terraces. The building in LEED-registered.

Located on the shores of Lake Michigan, the Bronson South Haven Hospital brings a unique delivery of care model and defines a new era healthcare to the local neighborhood and surrounding communities. The 52,000 SF Hospital and Medical Offices replaces an aging, full-service 49 bed community hospital serving both Allegan and Van Buren Counties in Western Michigan. The first floor consists of an inpatient unit, emergency department, imaging, support spaces, as well as the public lobby and dining space. The second floor includes a physician practice setting with multiple exam and treatment rooms to support primary and specialty care providers.

E4H planned and designed the first inpatient bed expansion at Virginia Hospital Center since 2004. The multi-phased project will convert existing medical offices on floors 3 and 4 into state-of-the-art inpatient units, with private patient rooms that are 60% larger than other units and 30% larger than standard patient rooms.

The project's mission was to solve the extensive inpatient needs of the campus, with the goal of increasing the number of single-rooms from 30% to 90% and updating the oldest rooms on the campus. The planning & conceptual design process involved heavy user group input including collaboration with the Facility Master Planning Steering Committee, Sustainability Council, Internal Departments, Design User Groups for nursing, support, and ancillary services, and Patients and Families Design User Group.

The 12,500 SF unit was designed and constructed in just 120 days and incorporates all of the planned care and documentation practices to support the Western Maryland community during the COVID-19 pandemic and future events as they may occur. The negative-pressure and ventilator-capable environment was designed adjacent to outpatient facilities and increases the overall capacity of available beds, while limiting the exposure of the infected patients. The unit features two operating modes: “normal,” where the rooms function as typical medical/surgical beds; and “infectious,” where all 20 rooms operate under negative pressure to care for infected patients and provide clinical safety.

Emergency Departments (EDs) frequently receive patients with behavioral issues that require them to be identified and potentially isolated as quickly as possible. Often, they need to be placed in specially-designed safe rooms or areas that are optimized for security. Understanding this, Emory wanted to create a safe space in their ED for behavioral health patients.