Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center, Athens, Georgia
Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center in Athens, Ga., serves patients from 17 counties in northeast Georgia and also provides a training site for medical students from the Medical partnership between Augusta University and the University of Georgia (Athens).
The medical center had undergone renovations and expansions over time with facilities dating back to the 1930s. The result was a campus that was difficult for visitors to navigate and less than ideal for operations.
Expansion and renovation of the medical campus.
To address these challenges, Piedmont Health embarked on a $194 million, multi-phase project, beginning with a one-story vertical expansion and renovation to allow for the relocation of 44 apartments. The second phase demolished an adjacent obsolete building and replaced it with a new six-story patient tower, creating a new main entrance and counseling center for the campus.
These improvements, completed in April 2022, enhance patient care, with expanded outpatient services, 128 private patient rooms, improved wayfinding, and a more efficient workflow that supports the medical center’s patient-centered care model. .
For staff, universally designed point-of-care workstations and support niches on inpatient floors are used instead of centralized nursing stations to keep caregivers closer to patients and shorten distance to access the supplies. Workstations are positioned to have a direct line of sight to patient rooms, with nearby collaboration spaces for care teams.
Elements of a holistic naturalistic aesthetic
The new patient tower is located along the street edge to emphasize an intuitive arrival sequence while creating a spacious internal courtyard, which became a key element of the design vision.
Surrounded by a residential district, the tower’s lower levels are recessed to create a welcoming “front porch” for the neighborhood, blurring the line between institutional and community space. The porch hosts farmers markets, food trucks, and community wellness events.
A biophilic design concept that includes themes inspired by nature and gardens in the use of patterns and shapes helps bring the outdoors inside and create a calming environment for patients, caregivers and family members.
Additionally, natural lighting is combined with interior design selections including blue and green wall paint tones, a living wall in the main foyer, wood accents and natural fiber wall finishes, to create a holistic naturalistic aesthetic.
Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center Project Details
Location: Athens, Georgia.
Completion date: April 2022
Owner: Piedmont Health
Total construction area: 229,000 square feet.
Total construction cost: $194 million
Cost/m2 sq ft: $847/sq ft. foot
Architect: SmithGroup (interior architect, landscape architect, lighting designer)
Associate Architect: Trinity: NAC
General Contractor: DPR Construction
Owner Representative: BDR Partners
Engineering: Newcomb & Boyd (MEP, fire protection, acoustics and communications design), Korda/Nemeth Engineering (structural), W&A Engineering (civil engineering)
Medical Planner: IMEG Corporation
Medical Planner: Chesapeake Health Planning
Signage Designer: Exit Design
