Five years after opening, Penn Medicine’s Clifton Center for Medical Breakthroughs remains one of the most ambitious hospital builds in the country — a $1.6 billion, 1.5 million-square-foot facility with 504 patient rooms and 47 operating rooms. In a recent Becker’s Healthcare webinar, leaders from Schneider Electric and Penn Medicine reflected on the eight-year journey to bring the building to life and the decisions that keep it state-of-the-art today.
Together, they explored how health systems can design intelligent hospitals around people, data and care.
Here are four key takeaways from the session:
1. Designing for readiness
With technology evolving faster than most construction timelines, the panelists agreed that flexibility must be built into a hospital from day one — from rightsized communication closets to category 6 cabling that can support systems that don’t exist yet.
“Too often we hear about future-proofing. You cannot future-proof anything,” said Braheem Santos, U.S. segment sales and market leader for healthcare at Schneider Electric. “What’s important is designing for malleability and flexibility, so systems are future-ready without requiring a complete rip-and-replace.”
That flexibility required advocating for physical space early. John Donohue, vice president of data and technology solutions at Penn Medicine, noted that his team secured extra capacity in communication closets, footwalls and ceilings and received their first request to scale just eight months after opening.
2. Discipline and governance
Delivering the project on time and on budget demanded hard choices. About eight months before go-live, the team froze the technology stack, resisting the temptation to squeeze in every new advancement.
“We felt that that was going to create more risk than value,” Mr. Donohue said. The building subsequently opened with just two service desk tickets in the first couple of days.
Strong governance made those decisions stick, from vetting Iris concepts with a patient advocacy group to holding firm when senior physicians requested last-minute additions. Penn Medicine’s leaders even built a half floor of the hospital in cardboard inside a rented warehouse, walked hundreds of staff through it, and redesigned the space based on their feedback before construction began.
3. The game changer
At the heart of the patient experience is Iris, a 70-inch digital footwall in every room that displays care team members, schedules and treatment information while letting patients control lighting, temperature, privacy and communication.
“It’s been a game changer,” Mr. Donohue said. “Not only has it improved the patient experience, I think it’s also made it easier for the providers.”
Mr. Santos emphasized that a deployment like Iris isn’t off the shelf, it requires open, interoperable systems, a dedicated testing lab and executive support. “You need leadership, the highest leadership within your organization to give you that license to dream,” he said.
4. Serving the patient
When the Clifton Center opened, a majority of AI in healthcare wasn’t ready for deployment. Five years later, Penn Medicine has integrated AI for ambient listening, scheduling optimization and radiology reads — all without rethinking the building’s design. Additionally, AI has been a positive factor in building automation systems.
The panel closed with a call for healthcare leaders to embrace bold, well-informed decisions rather than retreating from discomfort. As traditional healthcare design and construction reaches a precipice of change, the right partners and honest conversations can help organizations lead without taking on unnecessary risk. “You can be cutting edge and not bleeding edge,” Mr. Santos said. “Just take a second, take all the variables in, weigh it appropriately and take all the steps needed to mitigate risk and still lead the way for your individual health system and ultimately your patients to be served by it.”
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