From large master plan initiatives and new patient towers, to suburban medical facilities, all healthcare projects require the right focus, leadership, partnerships, and data to deliver high-impact results.

Sophisticated, experienced healthcare construction partners offer these tools – helping  mitigate risks, ensuring scope and budget alignment, and ultimately helping facilitate decisions and investments that support a healthcare system’s long-term strategies and patient care priorities. 

Following the Hub-and-Spoke Model for Decentralization

Houston’s population sprawl continues to create opportunities for health systems to expand into previously underserved communities.

In areas like The Woodlands, Sugar Land, Katy, Cypress, and League City, providers are increasingly building new facilities. Some also are repurposing “big box” retail spaces and mixed-use developments into local outpatient and diagnostic imaging centers.

This strategic hub-and-spoke expansion enables health systems to maintain their primary  “hubs” in the Texas Medical Center, while also serving patients with complementary  “spoke facilities” in the suburbs.

By decentralizing their locations and services, providers can care for higher acuity patients on their main campus,  while allowing for lower acuity and outpatient care at their  perimeter locations. It also reduces the number of patients and families navigating bigger campuses’ large parking garages, skywalks and interconnected buildings – minimizing complications and frustrations.

For many large institutional healthcare providers, this hub-and-spoke model extends reach and relieves pressure on core campuses that are typically land-locked. For patients, it improves access to care while creating patient environments that are particularly convenient, welcoming, and efficient to utilize.

Crafting Future-Ready Healthcare Facilities

Healthcare continues to evolve rapidly, especially with the emergence of AI, digital diagnostics, larger, multi-disciplinary care teams, data-rich systems, and personalized treatment technologies. These innovations require:

• Flexible infrastructure that can adapt to next-generation technology.
• Delayed medical equipment procurement strategies to allow the selection of cutting-edge equipment as late in the process as reasonably possible.
• Scalable designs that accommodate shifting patient volumes and service lines.

Planning for future growth and expansion can be even more difficult in such a dynamic environment. Savvy owners often mitigate these challenges by engaging their construction partners as early as possible in project lifecycle, ideally during project definition.

This earlier construction involvement allows for more innovation and informed decision-making, resulting in more flexible, scalable and future-forward designs – while also ensuring scope and decisions align with budgets.

Financial and Programmatic Alignment Matter More Than Ever

Large, campus-wide projects have always benefited from early cost alignment and contingency budgeting. Similarly, owners are adopting the same proactive approaches for their suburban facilities to manage cost escalation and ensure ROI, regardless of the project’s size and scale.

General contractors can play a critical role in guiding clients through programmatic alignment with financial strategy to ensure business objectives and patient care priorities  are met,  despite fiscal constraints and economic uncertainty.

Early engagement with health systems and their design partners in the project definition phase   – while programming is still being determined – allows our healthcare experts to help owners confidently vet the right mix of facilities and square footage to maximize ROI.

Early engagement also allows our healthcare team to ensure Key Planning Units (KPUs) and complimentary service lines provide an integrated care experience for staff and patients. This approach often results in the business case for service lines that will drive increased patient care value, as well as the associated revenue for those services.

By prioritizing early engagement in the financial and programmatic alignment of a project, JE Dunn arms healthcare clients with real-time data, helping guide early scope and budget evaluations to make the best, data-informed decisions for their systems.

This process helps ensure:

• Efficient use of capital.
• Stronger return on investment.
• Maximized revenue per facility and services line.
• Better alignment with the owner’s patient-care models and objectives.

Looking Ahead: Optimization and Intentionality

Facilities built for the future, adaptability, and enhanced patient access are defining how Houston is transforming healthcare infrastructure as we know it.

Proactive involvement of all project partners during early planning efforts can eliminate delays and enhance innovation while positioning healthcare owners for greater success and returns on their investments in in both major metroplexes and suburban communities.

Successful healthcare projects will benefit from this more streamlined project delivery model, because it allows contractors and owners to directly impact both speed to market and project cost, especially in today’s dynamic, highly competitive healthcare landscape.

Suburban healthcare isn’t a fleeting trend. It’s a critical component of future-forward,   agile, patient-focused healthcare facilities. By engaging the right partners, strategies and project approaches at the right time, it’s a future Houston’s healthcare owners are well-equipped to deliver.