San Antonio, Texas

These new clinics embrace the VA’s Patient Alignment Care Team (PACT) delivery model — a patient-driven, proactive, team-based approach to healthcare focused on wellness and prevention. Efficiency is also a driver of clinic design. Unlike a linear design, which has shared corridors and publicly exposed workstations, the VA clinics feature an onstage/offstage approach to exam room layout. This approach separates patients and visitors from staff with dedicated patient corridors leading to exam rooms (onstage) and enclosed staff work zones (offstage). Such a design will improve staff workflow, reduce travel distances, increase collaboration, protect confidentiality and privacy, and reduce patient throughput and wait times.

The three-story, 236,595 square-foot VA San Antonio clinic is designed around six PACT modules on two floors accommodating a total of 60 care and extended care teams who will serve 128 exam rooms equipped for general health, telehealth and women’s health. Each PACT team, which embraces a holistic approach to care, will include a pharmacist, mental health provider and case workers, enabling care to be delivered in a patient-centered environment where services come to the patient.

The new clinic will offer general and mental health, surgery, imaging, lab, pharmacy and CT/MRI services to the area’s 150,000 Veterans. The new San Antonio facility also will offer dental services in a clinic featuring 50 dental chairs, a dental surgery suite and a prosthetics lab.

The new San Antonio VA clinic welcomes patients with a healing embrace – a grand curved front entrance that guides wayfinding upon arrival. An atrium floods the main lobby with natural light and visually connects upper floors with the main level. The building’s sweeping curves are defined by a glass curtain wall, flanked on either side by stone veneer. The exterior is clad in Texas limestone and glass. Effective site integration with extensive native plantings result in a lush, park-like, pedestrian-friendly setting, further contributing to the healing experience. The interior design finishes create visual connections to the exterior – visual and physical access to the natural elements creates a healthy, relaxing environment to comfort patients and visitors, and improves staff productivity and retention.

In collaboration with USFP — which develops, finances, owns and operates federal government-leased properties — Hoefer Wysocki will lead the architectural and interior design of the new healthcare clinics. The design team includes Bob D. Campbell, structural engineering; Smith & Boucher, mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering; Protection Engineering Consultants, LLC, facade design and specialty structural engineering; FSC, Inc., fire protection engineering; and Merrick, Green Globe consulting. Construction began in summer 2019 and was completed July 2021.