Good Samaritan’s new main entry will reorganize how people move through the hospital.

An expansion of the MutiCare-Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup, Wash., is aiming to prove that hospitals, despite their unique energy needs, can be designed to achieve high performance.

Because of their unique ventilation needs, hospitals consume more resources than typical commercial buildings. Health care buildings accounted for 9 percent, or 515 trillion Btu, of the nation's total commercial building energy consumption in 2003, the last year for which data are available, according to the Energy Information Administration. Hospitals alone used 399 trillion Btu.

The $400-million expansion of MutiCare-Good Samaritan Hospital would include a nine-story tower with 80 private patient rooms and space for 80 additional rooms, a new lobby and space for new emergency, imaging and surgery departments. 

Designing a more sustainable hospital means working harder to find ways to earn LEED points, says Tom Clark, a principal at Clark/Kjos. For example, patients tend to drive to the hospital so reducing parking is difficult. Hospitals require 100 percent fresh air, which must be conditioned to inside temperature for infection control. To mitigate the issue, the design team incorporated a heat-recovery system to capture the heat otherwise lost in exhausted air.

The team is doing all it can to use natural light, says Clark. Not only do such measures save on energy costs, but studies show that increased natural light speeds up patient recovery time. The new tower will be oriented to minimize heat gain while sunshades on all south-facing windows would reduce glare  while allowing more natural light in winter. The design incorporates light shelves because of the "deep-plan" workspace inherent in hospitals, according to Clark.