LincolnHealth, a MaineHealth member organization, broke ground on a new $13.7 million medical office building at the Damariscotta campus. The 39,800-square-foot medical office building will house primary, specialty and behavioral care services, currently spread amongst four buildings on the riverside campus. The facility is slated for completion in late spring 2018.

The three-story building will feature a community room on the ground floor for education and special events that will be for both public and staff use.  At 1,000 square feet, it will be the largest room of this type on the campus. The ground floor will also house the psychiatry practice for Maine Behavioral Healthcare.

The first and second floors will house the provider practices including primary care, pediatrics, internal medicine, OBGYN, surgery, orthopedics, ENT and urology, along with consultation space for a dietician, pharmacist, social worker, physician and other professionals as the need arises. By integrating primary, specialty and behavioral practices in one facility, LincolnHealth’s patient-centered medical home will increase provider communication in real time.  Staff can move discretely between floors and work side by side with in their peers in a collaborative setting.

In developing the design plan over the course of two years with LincolnHealth, E4H Environments for Health Architecture modeled the building after its recent design of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center’s Nashua Clinic in Lebanon, N.H. By taking the model one step further, E4H created contiguous provider spaces between dedicated off-stage and on-stage areas. The incorporation of a perimeter corridor was central to this design, allowing for improved patient wayfinding and more natural light throughout the facility. Exam rooms on both floors are universal, allowing blurred practice lines between provider groups. The consult rooms on the perimeter face the outside wall along the periphery of the corridor bringing in natural light with the advantage of being converted in the future to exam rooms if needed for additional flexibility.

Hebert Construction Corporation of Lewiston, Maine, is the construction manager of this project, with a projected completion date of June 2018.