Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin
“NICU of the FUTURE” VISIONING PROCESS
Poltronieri Tang & Associates (PT&A) has been engaged by Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin
(CHW) to provide pediatric healthcare planning services to envision and design their idealized
“NICU of the Future”.

The Vision Statement for the proposed NICU describes an innovative and efficient design which
will:

• Allow CHW to continue to strengthen its regional and national reputations for quality NICU services, especially for neonates requiring integrated multi-specialty high-tech care
• Support CHW in its efforts to be a Children’s Hospital in the forefront of improving and measuring patient outcomes
• Reinforce CHW’s commitment to, and spread the word about, the NICU’s visionary family focused approaches
• Fully integrate the Froedtert Birth Center with the CHW NICU and continue development of cutting edge fetal care programs
• Maximize staff efficiency and visibility throughout the unit
• Minimize transports of neonates off the unit by providing Diagnostic & Treatment services including MRI on the unit and performing procedures at the bedside
• Help reinforce and increase the quantity of NICU research and medical education programs
  at CHW
• Develop buy-in and support from all staff members through an inclusive planning and
  design process
• Allow for future growth, scalability, and flexibility in order to allow CHW to nimbly respond
  to changes in census over time

The planning process involved a series of in-depth interviews with key stakeholders to obtain
focused insight into current, anticipated and idealized operations, configurations and services.
Stakeholders articulated their visions of the future NICU by writing “fantasy headlines” for the local
newspapers on opening day.
The space programming phase included development of a “scalable” space projection model, which
allowed the hospital to examine the spatial implications of developing a program which can expand
from 72 to 96 beds. This approach was crucial to helping the Hospital to better understand the full
impact of space requirements of their new state-of-the-art NICU.
PTA then developed an adjacency matrix and helped CHW to evaluate alternative locations for the
new NICU. PT&A is scheduled to begin schematic design of the NICU at CHW in early 2011.