Is it Healthy to turn Green?
Clark Kellogg Director of Strategic Services Gordon H Chong & Partners

Green design is gaining momentum among healthcare companies and architects, but there remains a significant gap between the desire to design, build, and operate a green building and the reality of designing, building, and operating a green building. Some of the barriers are technical. Others are organizational. Still others are regulatory. And, as the saying goes, "Sometimes the steepest part of the learning curve is attitude."

This is a story about how a large, bureaucratic organization engaged in a fiercely competitive industry is quietly turning green.

The Dichotomies of Scale
Conventional wisdom has it that when the client company is large, the resistance to green design, or any form of change, is strong. When the client is in an industry that has volumes of regulatory requirements, the impediments seem to grow exponentially. When the client is the nation's largest nonprofit healthcare plan, it combines the worst of both worlds: the resistance to change that comes with size and the regulatory environment that comes with the healthcare industry.

So how is it that Kaiser Permanente, with 8.4 million members and 122,000 employees, is able to make any headway at all with sustainable practices? It may seem counter-intuitive, but Kaiser Permanente is able to adopt sustainable design practices precisely because it is a large, bureaucratic institution in an industry saturated with regulations and compliance requirements. Understanding this seeming contradiction has been part of our firm's work with the healthcare giant.

As a member of Kaiser Permanente's Alliance Program--a stable group of architects and contractors serving Kaiser Permanente's design and construction needs--our firm, Gordon H. Chong & Partners, is fortunate to be a witness to, and a participant in, Kaiser Permanente's growing green initiatives. A member of our firm's healthcare studio, a LEED accredited professional, was asked to join Kaiser Permanente's Green Building Committee to contribute the perspective and knowledge of an outside architectural firm. This experience, combined with our firm's ongoing work designing Kaiser Permanente hospitals and medical office buildings, has given us the opportunity to serve, advise, and learn from Kaiser Permanente as it moves toward sustainable building and operating practices.

There are three factors that are enabling Kaiser Permanente to incorporate sustainable practices. The first is people. There is a courageous group of committed leaders within the company who lead the capital projects effort. The second is scale. Kaiser Permanente is currently building almost 38 million square feet of hospitals, medical offices, administrative offices, and parking structures. Because of its sheer size, many suppliers (our firm included) are eager to grow skills and knowledge to serve Kaiser Permanente's goals. The third is cost. Sustainability, among its many facets, is a cost-containment strategy that can deliver significant benefits to a company that runs 29 medical centers and 423 medical offices in 10 states, with operating revenues of nearly $20 billion. At this scale, fractional "green gain" amounts to millions of dollars that drop straight to the bottom line. It's a clear case of good design equaling good business.