Clarian Health Partners
Lab Part of Future for Downtown Indianapolis

by Steve Kaelble

The future is coming to conservative Indianapolis.

It's under construction at the north end of the downtown Indianapolis canal, where Clarian Health Partners is building an offsite, $65 million clinical laboratory facility.

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Once the facility is open in 2006, visitors will arrive mainly by the Clarian People Mover monorail. Blood samples and other lab materials will zip in from hospitals nearly a mile away via pneumatic tubes.

The lab will handle as many as eight million tests a year for the health network's three downtown hospitals as well as facilities in the suburbs.

"Its purpose is to consolidate our laboratory operations from all three campuses (Methodist Hospital, Indiana University Hospital and Riley Hospital for Children) into one facility," said Debra Uhl, vice president at Clarian and its IU Hospital. "It will also allow us to have education and conference space for teaching medical students, and it will house the School of Medical Technology. And it will provide offices for pathologists who oversee the operations of the laboratory."

Overcoming Site Issues

Construction of such highly technical facilities always has its challenges.

The Clarian lab facility is sandwiched between Interstate 65 and a station and track for the People Mover, a 1.5-mi. elevated monorail system that connects

Clarian's three downtown campuses. Along the People Mover track is a system of pneumatic tubing that will be used to deliver lab specimens to the new facility.

The site is so tight that there's not even room for parking for the more than 400 employees and physicians who will staff the 24-hour facility. For that reason, the first three floors of the building are parking levels, totaling 155,000 sq. ft. to accommodate about 300 spaces, according to Terry Brown, project manager for general contractor Wurster/Smoot CLC, a joint venture in Indianapolis.

Atop the three parking levels are three levels of occupied space totaling 168,000 sq. ft., along with a 17,000-sq.-ft. mechanical penthouse. Visitors who arrive by monorail will enter the building on the fourth level, which is the bottom of the laboratory.

Staging Strategy Needed

Though the facility is going up about a mile north of the downtown center, its construction requires creative staging akin to building a high-rise, Brown said.

"We have to stage from across the street, and using the floors of the building itself," he added. Also, "the People Mover has to stay open, and it's as close as 20 ft."

Cast-in-place concrete was the structure of choice for the lab project, said Todd Buerger, principal at architect BSA LifeStructures in Indianapolis. The parking-garage levels are post-tension concrete while the upper levels are normally reinforced, he added.

Concrete structural elements were chosen so vibration and noise would be cut, Buerger said.

"Being a lab building, we have instrumentation that is vibration-sensitive," and noise from the nearby interstate was another concern, he said. "We had a vibration study done on the site, and a sound study," and as a result of the latter the architects chose to use triple-pane glass in certain noise-sensitive areas, Buerger added.

The lab portion of the building makes use of a skip-joist system, which "allows us to have areas of the floor slab that we can easily core after the building is framed," he said.

The system has joists about every 5 ft., which allows added flexibility as lab equipment is placed and will make it easier to renovate or move equipment in the future.

Special MEP

As a lab facility, the building has special mechanical, electrical and plumbing needs, Brown said. Among other things, acid-waste piping runs through the facility, along with special air-handling systems to handle exhaust from lab areas.

"There also are some clean areas that required strict criteria, even for construction dust and debris," he said. "All mechanical systems are sitting on the roof in the penthouse structure."

Though the electrical cabling is relatively standard, the building does include a generator and backup system, and the phone/data cabling is extensive, Brown added.

Buerger said certain areas of the facility are designated as suitable for extra-heavy storage. In particular, the lab will make use of large cassettes holding specimen slides that together can weigh hundreds of pounds.

The site created issues beyond its size, which were apparent even as work began in December 2003, Brown said.

"It required mass excavation to spread the footing," he added. "Some of the area was contaminated with unsuitable soils." It also was necessary to reroute a sanitary sewer along with a well feeding the canal system that begins just across the street from the lab site.

As with many medical facilities, the lab project required the construction of mockups that allowed input from users. Wurster/Smoot provided mockups of lab furnishings and even some of the robotic equipment that will be used there.

Part of Life Sciences Park