LAWRENCEVILLE, GA — Northside Hospital Gwinnett in Lawrenceville, Georgia, is the first hospital in the Southeast to install the STAAT ModTM (Strategic, Temporary, Acuity-Adaptable Treatment) units to care for COVID-19 and other critically ill patients. These modules, designed by HGA and prefabricated and assembled by The Boldt Company, were some of the earliest solutions in the United States for expanding hospital facilities.

The innovative STAAT Mod is highly engineered to hospital quality standards and flexes to provide traditional inpatient capacity or critical care. The units can be operated with or without Airborne Infection Isolation Rooms (AIIR) that provide increased safety for both patients and caregivers. The acuity-adaptable rooms installed at Northside are a mix of critical care ICU, AIIR, and lower acuity spaces such as Step Down, Medical Surgical, and Observation rooms.

The STAAT Mods were constructed at The Boldt Company starting in August and shipped via semitruck to Northside beginning in September for final site installation. The first wing was opened for patients, with the completed 71-bed unit recently being turned-over to Northside. The units, totaling 46,983 square feet, were connected to hospital infrastructure and provide 71 new patient rooms to care for a variety of health needs.

“The Atlanta region is experiencing rapid growth and, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, we began looking at opportunities to increase our bed capacity and flexibility to handle an influx of patients,” said Debbie Mitcham, CEO of Northside Hospital in Gwinnett and Duluth. “In less than four months, we’ve been able to do what would normally take us 15 months, and this investment enables us to provide a quality and a durable solution to serve our community throughout the uncertain curve of this infection.”

The STAAT Mod has a 20-year life span, making it durable enough to support a hospital’s longer-term strategy and is fully code compliant. The space allows Northside the ability to care for a variety of patients without sacrificing clinical quality, safety, efficiency, or the dignity of any patient.

“The STAAT Mod is an easily repeatable solution with infinite variations. It can be adapted and assembled in many different arrangements and answers the escalating demand for flexible treatment space as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Kurt Spiering, Principal and Health Care Market Sector Leader at HGA, the multidisciplinary design firm behind the solution. “Within a few short months we had a 71-bed unit fully operational and ready to go. We need only weeks or months to fabricate, ship, install, and operationalize several inpatient wings. To build a new hospital would take years.”

The engineered, modular design of the STAAT Mod hospital-level care environments puts the safety of the patient and health care worker first while still accomplishing speed and capacity of other solutions.

The Boldt Company has been serving the health care market for decades, building hospitals and clinics nationwide. Boldt teams developed prototypes for modular construction and ramped up production in spring of 2020 to meet the emerging need for treating COVID-19 patients.

“This is an instance when a capability that was developed over time, met with opportunity and resulted in innovation,” said Will Lichtig, Chief of Staff and Executive Vice President for Performance and Innovation at Boldt. “Building in a controlled environment allowed our team to standardize the process, maintain quality and safety, increase speed to market, and ultimately help save lives.”

STAAT Mods Overview

• The STAAT Mod solution is designed by HGA, a national multidisciplinary design firm, and prefabricated and assembled by The Boldt Company, a national builder and leader in prefabrication.
• STAAT Mods are a modular kit-of-parts composed of acuity-adaptable inpatient rooms, staff spaces, material and supply rooms, and fully integrated infrastructure that combine to create a full inpatient wing.
• STAAT Mods are a quick-ship, prefabricated inpatient solution produced in a controlled environment, with improved quality for the end user that allows hospital systems to increase capacity, provide alternative care space for infectious patients, deploy a bridge strategy to a new facility, or provide swing space to minimize schedule and disruption during a long-term renovation.
• STAAT Mods include design features that are critical to quality and supported by evidence and research in the areas of infection control, wellbeing, visibility, efficacy, and deployment.
• The first STAAT Mods opened in May 2020 at Adventist HealthCare Fort Washington Medical Center in Maryland.