From Market Data to Master Plan

A Hospital That Anchors Its Own Community

BA was recently engaged by a hospital that sits at the edge of a major metropolitan area, in a community that considers itself very much its own place rather than a suburb of the bigger city next door. That local identity translates directly into patient loyalty: residents strongly prefer to stay local for care rather than travel into the neighboring metro, and the hospital, now roughly 450 beds after years of expansion, has grown into a large, high-performing facility built almost entirely around that hometown draw.

When the hospital issued an RFP for a new master plan, it asked for a five-year horizon, shorter than the 10- to 15-year outlook BA often uses for master planning. The team's approach was to keep the long view intact, projecting a decade or more of growth, and then work backward to translate that into concrete, actionable recommendations for the next five years. The engagement centered on three service lines the hospital identified as priorities: oncology, women's health, and heart and lung.

Turning Market Share into a Space Plan

BA Science's Director of Health Strategy, Derek Ortner, led the front end of the engagement: an independent, objective read on the hospital's market position before any space planning began. His method breaks a hospital's draw into three concentric zones, a primary service area generating about 75% of inpatient discharges, a secondary service area further out where competition intensifies, and a tertiary service area reached mostly by patients seeking a specialized program. Working zone by zone, Derek benchmarked current market share against total market volume, then worked with hospital leadership to gauge how aggressively they intended to grow it, weighing levers like physician recruitment, new community clinics, marketing investment, and partnerships with feeder hospitals in outlying areas.

From there, the projections became more granular: imaging modalities, inpatient and outpatient surgeries, discharges, rehab and therapy visits, lab and pharmacy volumes, all broken out by service line and, in some cases, all the way down to individual departments. Derek's demand model, for instance, showed the hospital already holding roughly 30% inpatient market share in oncology within its primary service area, a baseline used to calibrate what outpatient cancer growth might look like as the program expands. That output became the hard data behind every recommendation that followed: Director of Programming & Planning Kate Galpin translated the volume projections into space requirements, and Dallas-based Principal Architect Drew Garst then worked out how, or whether, that space could be arranged within the hospital's existing footprint.

Three Service Lines, Three Challenges

Oncology presented the most immediate story: the hospital was rebuilding its cancer program, already converting an existing medical office building on campus into a dedicated cancer center. The team's job is to help phase that build-out logically as the program scales.

Women's health had a different problem entirely: services were scattered across two towers and multiple floors, forcing patients to crisscross the campus depending on what care they needed. The recommendation was to consolidate those services on the same or adjacent floors wherever possible and give women's health its own labeled entrance.

Heart and lung services were similarly fragmented, with inpatient beds, procedural space, and outpatient clinics spread across disconnected parts of the building. Here the team's recommendation went further: propose a new addition to the main hospital, purpose-built to house outpatient heart and lung services and give the service line its own entrance, while rearranging the inpatient side of the program for tighter adjacencies elsewhere in the existing building.

The engagement extended beyond the primary service lines. The team reviewed the hospital's operating rooms and identified a potential future site for an additional ambulatory surgery center on campus, along with several underused spaces recommended for closure and repurposing.

Ambulatory Network Development

One of the more forward-looking pieces of Derek's analysis pushes past the current five-year plan altogether: mapping projected demand, down to specific services like cardiac catheterization, by zip code across the hospital's service area. Where that data reveals real volume without a nearby hospital-affiliated clinic, it becomes the starting case for a future outpatient location, extending the hospital's reach into the community well beyond its own campus walls.