Riverside Methodist Hospital—Center for Medical Education + Innovation Columbus, OH
Riverside Methodist Hospital’s new Center for Medical Education + Innovation (CME+I) is a prototype teaching and clinical research facility unlike any other in the nation. As such, it was important for the facility’s image to reflect and support that leadership role. Furthermore, because advanced technologies play such an important role in the facility’s capacity, it was equally important that the facility embrace a modern and technologic vocabulary in its overall expression. In fact, the crisply modern and somewhat mechanistic vocabulary marked a dramatic departure from Riverside’s more traditional norm. But it did convey the institution’s commitment to the advancement of medical science through application of the most cutting-edge technology available.
Project category: New construction (completed June 2005)
Chief administrator: Pamela Boyers, PhD, Director of Medical Education, (614) 566-5135
Firm: Moody Nolan, Inc., (614) 461-4664
Design team: Eileen M. Goodman, NCIDQ, Director of Interior Design; Kristen Winters, Interior Designer; J. William Miller, AIA, ACHA, Director of Healthcare Architecture; Ron Canini, AIA, Project Manager; William Markland, AIA, Project Assistant; John Kloch, RA, Project Architect
Photography: ©2005 Michael Houghton, StudiOhio
Total building area (sq. ft.): 16,850
Construction cost/sq. ft.: $119
Total construction cost (excluding land): $2,000,000
The new CME+I includes three suites, accommodating three distinct functions. The Conference Suite houses a large hall, two smaller conference rooms, and a distance-learning suite. A Laboratory Skills Center presents students with a number of true-to-life reproductions of actual clinical environments—reproductions that can be both monitored and manipulated by the teaching staff for maximum effect. Finally, the Virtual Care Unit accommodates an advanced educational experience, presenting students with a wide variety of real-life, interactive scenarios featuring ultra-realistic, programmable patient dummies.
When Riverside conceived the CME+I, it realized the importance of presenting this bold experiment in a series of equally bold and technologically expressive spaces. It created a contemporary, streamlined, and cleanly modern expression, underscoring the hospital’s recognition of the fundamental role science and technology play in the advancement of medicine.
