WHR Completes Several Projects
OKLAHOMA CITY — The $98 million Oklahoma Heart Hospital South Campus opened its 46 beds and 30 general cardiovascular rooms to the public earlier this year.
A replication of one of the country’s first all-digital hospitals, Oklahoma Heart Hospital North, the South Campus is one of several recently opened healthcare facilities designed by WHR Architects of Houston.
The 163,000-square-foot, completely digital Oklahoma Heart South Campus was developed collaboratively between Oklahoma Heart Hospital, Mercy Health Center, Norman Regional Health System and Midwest Regional System.
The new facility adds 16 ICU beds, 15 day patient beds, 10 emergency room beds, two operating rooms, four catheterization labs, an imaging department, pharmacy and laboratory to Oklahoma City’s medical facilities. Oklahoma Heart South also has the capability to expand to 62 beds.
The new facility combines an embedded fiber options system designed to facilitate paperless electronic medical records with a patient- and staff-friendly floor layout that locates emergency rooms near operating rooms and catheterization labs.
Other newly opened projects designed by WHR Architects include the Leah M. Fitch Lawton Cancer Center in Lawton, Okla., the Richard and Lucille DeWitt School of Nursing in Nacogdoches, Texas, and the Research Park Campus Behavioral and Biomedical Sciences Building at the Texas Medical Center in Houston.
“Each of these projects is the result of close collaboration with our clients to create vanguard facilities designed to help them meet their missions – be it cardiac care or cancer treatment, nursing education or biomedical research,” says WHR Chairman David Watkins.
Opened last December, the $10.4 million, 25,843-square-foot Leah M. Fitch Lawton Cancer Center at Comanche County Memorial Hospital houses three distinct cancer care programs: medical oncology, radiation oncology and physician/clinic related services.
In Texas, at Stephen F. Austin State University, the $13 million Richard and Lucille DeWitt School of Nursing adds to the campus 41,000 square feet of space with four simulation laboratories, four large classrooms, a conference room, faculty and student lounges, offices and an enclosed atrium.
Opened last January, the DeWitt School was designed like a hospital — including an ambulance bay, an intensive-care unit and neonatal intensive and pediatric care units — to train new nurses in a simulated environment.
Also, the University of Texas Health Science Center added the $74 million Research Park Campus Behavioral and Biomedical Sciences Building to its campus at Houston’s Texas Medical Center in March. The 153,000-square-foot, six-story facility includes spaces for a regenerative medicine program, clinical research programs in psychiatry and outpatient clinics offering assessments and specialized care for patients with autism, mood and anxiety disorders and other psychiatric disorders.
WRH Architects has a number of projects in various stages of development, including the 1.6 million-square-foot Methodist Hospital Outpatient Care Center at the Texas Medical Center in Houston and the $40 million Texas A&M University at Galveston’s Science Building and Sea Life Center, both of which are expected to open this year.