The new full-service Capital Health Medical Center – Hopewell admitted its first patients in November 2011, replacing the healthcare system’s Mercer campus facility in Trenton, NJ, and is the state’s first hospital to earn LEED Gold certification. This suburban 165-acre site near Interstate 95 allows Capital Health to reach a larger population base than the previous urban location on a constrained site that rendered any expansion extremely costly and difficult.

7group facilitated an integrative design process and worked with the project team by providing workshop facilitation, energy consulting, preliminary energy modeling, and LEED consulting, specifications and documentation services. The six-story project includes a 223-bed hospital of 559,000 sf connected via a multi-level atrium public space to a 328,000 sf medical office building, and supported by a 38,000 sf central utility plant. 7group also produced a series of educational videos focused on the project’s green features, art and healing, local community engagement/economic development, and Capital Health history.

Capital Health has provided public transportation infrastructure linking the patient base from the former Mercer campus with easy access to the new site and to a third hospital campus. Site design strategies focused on developing healing gardens that surround the building, as well as a large pedestrian roof garden, stormwater quality measures, and protecting/restoring habitat. Extensive daylighting was implemented throughout the multi- level atrium and patient rooms. Large exterior windows provide ample views of the surrounding landscape and preserved wetlands, thereby maximizing natural light quality, which has been shown to improve overall recovery and reduce patients’ length of stay. Also included are a 500 kW photovoltaic system for on-site generation of renewable energy, reduced heating and cooling loads, significant potable water consumption reductions, and strategies that earned 13 of 15 Indoor Environmental Quality points.