The MetroHealth System in Cleveland, OH is a bright spot of hope and healing for the community. Featuring HGA designed architecture, it has become much more than just a medical center.

In 2011, The MetroHealth System in Cleveland conducted a facility condition assessment of its safety-net hospital buildings, ranging in age between 50 and 90 years, to determine the best path forward.

“The answer from a dollars and cents standpoint did in fact show that it was far more practical to rebuild than to try and renovate,” says Walter Jones, senior vice president of campus transformation at MetroHealth.

However, a replacement project didn’t immediately receive the leadership buy-in required to set the funding wheels in motion for the public hospital—that is, until the winter of 2013/2014. An arctic blast hit the city on Lake Erie, causing MetroHealth to consider evacuating the hospital on two occasions, Jones says.

“The infrastructure of the existing facilities demonstrated that it was incapable of providing ongoing, continuous, reliable support for the foreseeable future. It nearly failed during that winter event,” he says. “That became a clear definition of the condition of the facility, probably in no way a report could ever do.”

And so the process began. In May 2014, the organization announced its mission to transform the hospital into a modern care setting capable of serving a long-term future. That move also inspired the 2014 hiring of Jones, putting him in place to lead the charge.

However, he says today, the original vision of what essentially was to be “a simple replacement hospital” soon broadened. “‘Transformation’ took on more in terms of its definition than originally conceived of,” he says.