By Healthcare Facilities Today

The future was supposed to be brighter for the Modesto (Calif.) Medical Center. When the 670,000-square-foot complex opened in 2008, it was intended to be a green laboratory for future green-building projects for Kaiser Permanente, the health care organization with more than 600 medical facilities.

So far, the center’s medical facilities and full-service hospital have not quite lived up to expectations, according to an article on Facilitiesnet.com

“One of the most valuable lessons we have learned over the past six years is that just because you are handed over a beautiful, brand-new building, don’t assume that everything is going to run as designed,” said Ed Gonzales, the medical center’s chief engineer, in the article.

“My team and I have discovered that new isn’t perfect, and that once you figure out how to work out all the bugs, there are always more creeping around,” he said.

Many of the medical center’s issues relate to the ongoing challenge facing most maintenance and engineering managers to push the energy efficiency of institutional and commercial facilities.

"We’ve had issues regarding maintaining efficiency with many of our systems,” Gonzales said. “Energy conservation is now a top priority locally and at a regional level. We’ve discovered that from the original build, there were many systems that were value engineered, which means two things. One, sometimes things look good on paper when in reality, it’s the end user that has to find ways to keep a system running. Two, saving money at the beginning will always cost you more in the end.”

Read the article.