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There was a time when pneumatic tube systems were considered the latest in technology. Companies in metropolitan high-rise buildings used the systems to shuttle important paperwork from one office to another. Bank customers at drive-thru stations popped their deposits into plastic cylinders that moved through tubes via compressed air to tellers.

These days, most bank drive-thru stations now feature ATM machines, and companies in skyscrapers rely on email and teleconferencing for communication. But pneumatic tube systems haven’t disappeared completely.

Many hospitals still use the systems to transport lab specimens, medications and some paperwork between buildings on what are often large-scale medical campuses. Oregon Health and Science University is no exception, according to Bradley Taylor, the health care program manager in OHSU’s design and construction department.

OHSU’s pneumatic tube system handles more than 3,000 individual transactions a day. About half of those transactions are lab samples and specimens, and the others are a mix of prescription medications and paperwork. As such, the system plays a vital role in keeping operations moving. That’s why, a few years ago, administrators determined it was time to upgrade the 25-year-old system.

“It was old, and the campus had expanded beyond its capabilities,” Taylor said.

The right fit

Administrators didn’t make the decision to replace the pneumatic tube system lightly. The “brain” of the system resides on the 15th floor of one building. From there, it spreads out into what Taylor describes as “a great big spaghetti” of approximately 25,000 feet of six-inch tubing that runs between 10 buildings. Although most of those buildings are connected, some are in locations that require the tube system to cross roads and run along bridges.

“The pneumatic tube reaches every single corner of the hospital,” Taylor said.

He and his department knew the upgrades to the system would have to mesh with the around-the-clock operations of the hospital. The work also would require that crews be located in some sensitive areas: emergency rooms, operating rooms, sterile labs that could be contaminated by even the smallest speck of dust.

OHSU maintains master agreements with four separate general contractors, including Skanska USA Building. While Skanska had worked on small pneumatic tube lines and had experience adding stations to tube systems for other health care systems, the company hadn’t handled a project as big as the OHSU upgrade, according to Skanska senior project manager Narciso Figueroa.

OHSU administrators, however, knew the company had a proven track record for being something they considered crucial for project success: a proven record for being able to communicate well with personnel in a variety of departments across OHSU’s campus.

Expect the unexpected

Taylor’s department and Skanska had two options for handling the upgrades to the tube system. They could take what Taylor calls the Big Dig approach – shutting down alternating sections of the system. That would require constant fluctuations and adjustments for affected departments. Or they could completely shut down the entire system.

They chose the latter approach, relying on about 100 employees to transport the specimens and prescription medications the tube system usually handled.

Skanska, meanwhile, scheduled five phases of construction in ways that would have the least possible impact on hospital operations. The contractor’s crews worked weekends and nighttime shifts whenever necessary.

“We’d give them a two-, three-week look ahead and coordinate with management,” Figueroa said.

Planning ahead didn’t prevent the unexpected from occurring, however.

“It was kind of a design-build-slash-work-through in some areas,” Figueroa said. “We were designing as we went along (for some parts).”

Some of the surprises were of a welcome nature. Skanska was able to shave $500,000 off of the original $5.5 million estimated project cost when the general contractor found an unexpected shaft that went from the top of the building to the first floor, Figueroa said. By directing tubing through the shaft, rather than following the original plan to core a new passageway for the system, Skanska reduced the amount of core materials and concrete originally planned for the work.

No amount of preplanning, however, could have prevented what Taylor said was one of the biggest challenges of the project for his department.

Unlike a simple point-to-point pneumatic tube system, OHSU’s system features 78 computerized stations, all of which can send and receive transactions from each other. Knowing that they were using a new vendor for the upgraded portion of the tube system, Taylor and his staff took necessary steps to ensure the software for the system being introduced would mesh with the exiting IT systems used throughout OHSU.

“We understand how to design and construct things, but this turned into an IT project,” Taylor said. “Because of the complexity involving 78 stations, 200 pieces of equipment and 3,000 transactions a day, the software was more complex than we expected.”

The overall upgrades were completed in February. The final tweaks necessary to get the new software to work perfectly with OHSU’s existing network required a few additional weeks, but recently were completed thanks to assistance from the OHSU IT department, Taylor said.

The software lesson is one he thinks AEC firms that work on health care projects – or hope to work on them in the future – would do well to heed.

“I think the big thing to understand is that our world is becoming, and continues to become, more and more connected,” Taylor said. “The IT network is that connection point. Any system that plugs into the network, which these days is almost everything, be prepared.”

There’s also a footnote for firms returning to do work for a health care client they’ve worked with in the past. Caution in these cases is just as important.

“Just because something wasn’t connected last time you worked on it, doesn’t mean it isn’t now,” Taylor said.

Mahlum Architects provided architectural drawings for the project. Engineering was handled by MLC Engineering.