Sun Life Family Health Center
Sun Life Family Health Center
A City's First Front Door, Four Stories Tall
Origin & Vision
A Building of Their Own
For most of its history, Sun Life Health's services were spread across leased clinics and offices throughout Casa Grande, Arizona, with no single space that was unmistakably its own. The new Sun Life Family Health Center changes that.
Rising four stories on Florence Boulevard across from Banner Hospital, the building is Sun Life Health's first owned facility and new flagship location, bringing together primary care, women's services, behavioral health, lab, imaging, a teaching pharmacy, and administrative space under one roof. Sun Life's yellow-orange brand color runs in vertical stripes down the exterior and carries through the interior palette, and the public lobby, oriented north toward a shared courtyard, was designed by BA with a hospitality-driven feel rather than a clinical one. Initially conceived as a 150,000-square-foot building, BA strategically reduced the footprint to 112,000 square feet while maintaining the entire functional program.
Complexity & Perseverance
Designing Against a Three-Year-Old Budget
As a federally qualified health center, Sun Life Health's financing was locked years before BA's design team picked up a pencil. The loan had been sized to an earlier version of the program, and federal rules meant that number couldn't move, no matter how the community or construction costs changed in the meantime.
Rather than design first and reconcile budget later, BA closed that gap early, aligning a fixed sum with Sun Life's full vision for the building. That discipline carried through construction: a full-scale mockup event helped right-size every exam room down to the door swing, and close coordination with the contractor surfaced smarter alternatives before problems ever reached the drawing board.
When the city requested infrastructure improvements beyond the project's scope, Sun Life Health funded them independently through a self-funded impact-fee reserve rather than scale back the design. The result is a building that reads as generous rather than constrained, with every decision made in service of what mattered most.
Discovery
The Tablets Outside the Exam Room
During an early walkthrough of Sun Life's existing clinics, the BA Science team noticed small tablets mounted outside every exam room, quietly logging how long each patient waited, how long each visit took, and how each provider's day actually moved. Sun Life had been collecting this data for years, and BA had not yet worked with a client who had.
What began as curiosity turned into an approach that reshaped how BA plans clinics. The team built its first comparative clinic-model report card from that data, the seed of what is now BA Science, an established service line at the firm, and pushed the analysis further into full simulation modeling, another practice area that traces directly back to this project. Sun Life's data-forward instincts, paired with BA's programming and clinical planning work to understand the client's existing services and workflows, gave the team a measurable way to determine which layouts actually performed best, informing features like the center's twelve self-service check-in kiosks and technology that lets providers track patient wait times.
COMMUNITY HUB
Designed to Give Back
In keeping with Sun Life Health's vision of becoming a community hub, BA sited and designed the building around a large outdoor courtyard placed in the shadiest area of its L-shaped footprint. Positioning the courtyard on the north side provides maximum shelter from the Arizona heat while offering pleasant outdoor views from the clinical waiting areas above.
The courtyard is designed to host future community events such as farmers markets and clinics, and infrastructure is in place to accommodate future carports with solar panels that could provide emergency power to nearby residents during outages.
