BA Science
Strategic advising, planning, and coaching—grounded in data.
BA Science is the advisory and consulting arm of BA. We advise healthcare systems, plan facilities, and coach project teams, with every recommendation rooted in evidence and experience.
$50B
Total project costs
$420M
Target Value Delivery savings on $7B in construction
6%
Average savings per project coached
27%
Reduction in RFIs, resulting in $30M estimated savings
Strategic market intelligence, demand modeling, and operational analysis that inform capital decisions and facility strategies.
Advise
Strategic Health Advisory
The most consequential decisions in healthcare happen long before ground is broken. BA Science’s Strategic Health Advisory service, led by Derek Ortner, engages health systems at the earliest and most critical stage of planning, helping them determine what services to offer, where to offer them, and how to sustain them competitively for years to come. With 15 years of healthcare executive experience, Derek brings a rare perspective: He has sat on the client's side of the table and personally overseen more than $500 million in building projects.
The Right Questions, Asked First
Before any design effort begins, Derek helps clients stress-test their assumptions and sharpen their strategy. Through an integrated suite of services—competitive market analysis, provider demand modeling, capital planning, project validation, and operational benchmarking—Derek ensures that every decision is grounded in data and connected to the full picture. And rather than separating these modalities, Derek delivers a unified, turnkey solution tailored to each client's specific goals.
Performance Built into the Plan
Strategic Health Advisory doesn't stop at strategy. When existing operations need improvement, Derek partners with BA Science’s lean specialists to benchmark performance against true peer organizations, identify gaps, and implement targeted continuous improvement initiatives.
Featured projects
Advise
Operational Excellence Consulting
Great design alone doesn't guarantee a great-performing facility. BA Science’s Operational Excellence Consulting service, led by Mike Oswald, bridges the gap between design and the way spaces function in daily use. Drawing on lean manufacturing principles and deep process engineering expertise, Mike works side by side with your staff to uncover hidden inefficiencies, eliminate waste, and optimize workflows from the inside out.
Diving into the details
Where traditional architectural programming captures which spaces are needed, Mike’s operational work examines how they are used. Through Value Stream Mapping, 3P facilitation workshops, and direct observation, Mike documents real patient, staff, and material flows to identify critical bottlenecks. Whether it's a misplaced sharps container or a systemic admissions delay, we find what's costing you, and we fix it.
Capacity without Capital
Not every challenge requires a capital project. For organizations facing capacity constraints, patient wait times, or staff workflow frustrations, our standalone consulting delivers measurable results using your existing resources. From emergency departments and sterile processing to labs, clinics, and science & technology facilities, we help organizations build the capacity they need through smarter, leaner operations.
Featured projects
Data-driven programming, benchmarking, and evidence-based design research that translate evidence into operational specifications and design decisions.
Plan
Healthcare Programming
A great healthcare facility begins with the right questions. BA Science’s Healthcare Programming & Medical Planning team works at the earliest, most formative stages of a project to ensure that every design decision is grounded in real-world data, operational need, and long-term vision. Our medical planners are more than space planners: They are facilitators, problem-solvers, and advocates who bridge the gap between a client's strategic goals and the built environment that must support them.
Where Strategy Becomes Space
Medical planning is the art of translating complex clinical workflows into functional, efficient layouts. Our team leverages more than 40 years of design data, current market benchmarks, and a deep library of typologies to right-size programs and stress-test scenarios early. Using low-fidelity tools like diagrams and typologies, we iterate quickly with clients and stakeholders, aligning competing priorities and building consensus. The result is a design that reflects what clients truly need.
Confident Decisions, From Day One
When a medical planner is engaged early, projects move with greater clarity and far less rework. Our planners facilitate visioning sessions, benchmark proposed programs against peer facilities, and ensure that clinical staff, administrators, and design teams are working toward the same goals. The measure of a successful engagement is straightforward: Stakeholders feel heard, the program reflects agreed-upon priorities, and the design holds up through every phase that follows.
Featured projects
Plan
Design Research
BA Science’s Design Research practice, led by Meredith Banasiak, brings the rigor of Evidence-Based Design (EBD) to every stage of the planning process, ensuring that decisions about the built environment are grounded in credible research. Meredith translates a growing body of knowledge about how physical environments affect patient stress, staff safety, and quality of care into actionable design guidance.
From Questions to Clarity
Our toolkit spans the full arc of inquiry: market analysis and goal-setting to establish direction early; observation, interviews, and occupant surveys to capture lived experience on the ground; operational benchmarking to establish a clear performance baseline; and journey mapping to keep human experience at the center of design. Each method yields concrete, actionable deliverables—annotated floor plans, data summaries, process maps—that give teams and clients a shared, evidence-backed foundation for every decision.
Rigor That Pays Off
Engaging Design Research means your project benefits from more than a decade of in-house expertise and a continuously growing body of findings. Whether validating a proposed layout, benchmarking against peer facilities, or understanding how occupants experience a space, Meredith provides independent, credible analysis that strengthens both the design and the client's confidence in it. The result is less guesswork, fewer costly course corrections, and facilities that perform as intended for the people who use them every day.
Featured projects
Fully integrated project management, working alongside teams rather than outside them to deliver optimal results on complex projects.
Collaborate
Collaborative Project Delivery Coaching
Great construction projects are built on great relationships. BA Science’s Collaborative Project Delivery Coaching service addresses the human side of complex projects. Grounded in lean principles and a deep respect for people, this team embeds directly with project teams as player-coaches, delivering projects that finish faster, cost less, and leave teams stronger.
People, Process, and the Space Between
The coaching toolkit spans the full project lifecycle, combining proven Lean methods with a people-first philosophy. Services range from Target Value Delivery, Pull and Takt Planning, and integrated financial forecasting to strengths-based team development, executive coaching, and certified mediation. Communication is treated not as a soft skill but as a fifth core project metric—equal to safety, schedule, budget, and quality—with dedicated systems to prevent the accumulated miscommunications that quietly derail even well-run projects.
Where Relationships Drive Results
This team's differentiator is simple and rare: they take the relational dimensions of a project as seriously as the technical ones. Engagements are typically multi-year assignments on large, complex projects operating under collaborative delivery agreements like IPD, where the stakes of team dysfunction are highest. Whether navigating contract negotiations, bridging communication between field teams and executive leadership, or providing a confidential ear to a leader under pressure, the Collaborative Project Delivery Coaching team meets people where they are and helps them do their best work together.
Featured projects
Collaborate
Industrialized Construction Design and Consulting
BA Science’s Industrialized Construction Design and Consulting service applies manufacturing principles and lean thinking to reimagine not just what gets designed, but how it gets built. Leveraging the advantages of modular design and parallel workflows, this approach delivers measurable gains in schedule, quality, and consistency.
Design Once, Build Again and Again
Modular thinking and prefabrication are most powerful in combination. Our team identifies which components can be standardized, develops prefabrication-ready designs in close coordination with fabricators and trade partners, and sequences parallel workflows to compress schedules without sacrificing quality. The payoff can be dramatic, cutting months from traditional construction timelines.
Creativity Sharpened by Constraint
A common misconception is that prefabrication limits design. Our team's experience is the opposite: Industrialized construction demands more intentional, more technically rigorous, and ultimately more rewarding designs. It asks architects to think in terms of systems, not just spaces, and to deliver results that are both beautiful and efficient.
Featured projects
See our Projects
From strategy and studies to coaching and construction, see some of the groundbreaking work the BA Science team has completed.
Our Team
The people behind the data
Researchers, Lean coaches, programmers, and design specialists—embedded within BA and ready to support your next project.
Romano NickersonAIA
Director of Lean Practices
Katharine GalpinAssociate AIA
Director of Programming
Derek Ortner
Vice President of Health Strategy
Karen CostelloAssociate AIA
Vice President of Integrated Strategy and Design
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