The Palo Alto Medical Foundation for Health Care, Research and Education (PAMF) is a healthcare success story of the first order.

The not-for-profit healthcare organization serves the San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula and is a pioneer in both multispecialty group medical practice and outpatient medicine. When its Redwood Shores Health Center reached full capacity, PAMF decided to open new medical offices in Redwood City.

PAMF found a building for its new offices, but the entire 13,000 square feet of space needed to be reconfigured. The space occupied the second floor of a three-story building – and construction would have to take place while the existing medical offices on floors 1 and 3 continued operating normally.

XL Construction Tackles the Task
To handle this tricky project PAMF called on XL Construction, who not only excels in healthcare construction projects, but also has specialized experience working in occupied buildings.

XL Construction took a design/assist role for the architectural and structural aspects of the project and managed the mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) portion under a design-build delivery method. After validating the conceptual design for renovating the Redwood City space according to PAMF's requirements, XL Construction went to work.

The project included 33 new exam rooms, adding new sinks to each room, plus a number of doctor offices, medical assistant stations, a radiology suite, a phlebotomy suite and adjoining small lab to process blood samples, a procedure room for minor surgeries, and a new information technology (IT) closet with its own dedicated cooling system.

Using Finesse and Good Planning
Throughout the four months of construction, the medical practitioners on the building's first and third floors continued seeing patients and going about their business, undisturbed by PAMF's second-floor construction project.

Each night for six weeks, XL Construction's team installed plastic to protect a section of the first floor, ran the plumbing through the first floor ceiling to the second floor, got the work inspected that night, and cleaned up before the occupants returned in the morning.

Before long, PAMF was able to move into the new second-floor offices. This PAMF Redwood City Center now provides primary care services, including family practice medicine, pediatrics and internal medicine, as well as on-site laboratory services.

Using its expertise in medical construction, MEP management and working in occupied buildings – plus its excellent planning and project management acumen – XL Construction was able to complete the PAMF project on time, on budget and to the complete satisfaction of PAMF.

"XL Construction is extraordinarily well organized, with clear processes and communication," said Jeff Teel, Director of Architecture at PAMF. "All team members have such positive attitudes, answering any challenges with 'We can do that!' and then making it happen. It gives us great confidence in the success of our projects to have an organization working with us that we can trust to get it done right."