Article in Brief

• Healthcare closer to the community: The Robert B. Green Campus brought primary care, specialty care, urgent care, outpatient surgery, imaging and other services together at a major outpatient destination near downtown San Antonio.
• New construction met a historic campus: Bartlett Cocke’s work combined a new clinical facility with renovations to existing buildings, allowing the campus to evolve while maintaining an important connection to San Antonio’s healthcare history.
• Sustainability was built into performance: The Clinical Pavilion earned LEED Gold certification and was designed to use 26% less energy than a conventional building.

Healthcare facilities do more than house medical services. Where they are located, how they bring services together and how easily patients can navigate them can all influence how a community accesses care.

That made the transformation of University Health’s Robert B. Green Campus in downtown San Antonio about more than constructing a new building. Bartlett Cocke General Contractors helped deliver an approximately 300,000-square-foot healthcare project designed to bring a broad range of outpatient services together while renewing a campus that has served generations of San Antonio residents.

Bringing More Healthcare Services Under One Roof

The Robert B. Green Campus was developed around a straightforward idea: make comprehensive outpatient healthcare more accessible.

The new Clinical Pavilion brought together primary and specialty care, pediatric services, urgent care, outpatient surgery, imaging, laboratory services and other ambulatory healthcare functions. The facility also incorporated hundreds of exam and treatment spaces to support a high volume and variety of patient needs.

For patients, concentrating those services created a more comprehensive healthcare destination near downtown and San Antonio’s West Side. University Health described the new pavilion at its opening as a “one-stop” location for outpatient care, reducing the need for patients to travel to University Hospital for many services and procedures.

Today, the Robert B. Green Campus continues to serve as a hub for University Health’s ambulatory care network.

Renewing a Historic San Antonio Healthcare Campus

Building for the future did not mean starting with a blank site.

The original Robert B. Green Memorial Hospital opened in 1917, giving the campus more than a century of connection to healthcare in Bexar County. The broader project paired new construction with the renovation and reuse of existing facilities.

Bartlett Cocke’s work included renovation of the historic Robert B. Green Hospital building for new uses, including medical office and administrative space and therapy services. An existing building on the campus was also stripped back and rebuilt to accommodate functions including a new pharmacy, dining and security.

That combination of new construction and adaptive reuse illustrates an important consideration for owners with established healthcare campuses: modernization does not always require replacing everything that came before it.

Existing buildings can remain part of a campus strategy when their structure, location and potential uses align with future operational needs.

Sustainability That Supports Long-Term Operations

Healthcare facilities operate around the clock and can place significant demands on energy and water. At Robert B. Green, sustainability was therefore more than an architectural feature.

The Clinical Pavilion achieved LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. According to University Health, the building was designed to use 26% less energy than a conventional building.

The sustainability strategy extended across the project. Features included condensate harvesting for irrigation, low-flow plumbing fixtures, drought-tolerant landscaping, reflective roofing and paving materials, and low-VOC finishes. Nearly 90% of construction waste was also recycled, diverting almost 2,600 tons from landfills.

For healthcare owners, these decisions demonstrate how sustainability can be considered alongside clinical function, patient experience and long-term facility operations rather than treated as a separate objective.

Coordination Behind a Complex Clinical Environment

A comprehensive outpatient facility brings together spaces with very different technical requirements.

Primary care exam rooms do not function like imaging departments. Imaging departments do not function like outpatient surgery. Pharmacy, laboratory and specialty clinics each introduce their own equipment, utilities, workflows and building-system requirements.

That makes coordination during design and preconstruction especially important.

The Robert B. Green project team used Building Information Modeling (BIM) as part of the design and construction process, including regular coordination focused on constructability and value engineering. This type of coordination gives designers, builders, trade partners and owners an opportunity to identify conflicts and understand how complex systems will come together before installation.

For an owner, the value is not technology for technology’s sake. The objective is a better-informed construction process and a facility whose systems support the people who ultimately use them.

Building a Healthcare Facility Around the Community It Serves

One of the most significant measures of a healthcare project is what happens after construction ends.

When the Clinical Pavilion opened, it expanded access to outpatient care for people living and working in and around San Antonio’s central city. The project also created an opportunity for the construction itself to contribute locally.

University Health reported that 98% of subcontractor participation on the project was local, with 64% participation from small, minority- and women-owned businesses.

That local involvement added another dimension to the project’s community impact. The facility was built to serve San Antonio residents, and much of the work of building it was performed by businesses from the community itself.

What Healthcare Owners Can Take From Robert B. Green

The Robert B. Green Campus demonstrates that healthcare construction decisions can influence much more than the building footprint.

Bringing complementary services together can make care more convenient for patients. Reusing existing facilities can extend the value of an established campus. Sustainable design can reduce demands on energy and water over the life of the building. Early coordination can help increasingly complex clinical systems work together as intended.

Those outcomes begin well before construction.

For owners planning a new outpatient facility or the next phase of an existing healthcare campus, the opportunity is to consider patient access, clinical operations, existing assets, building performance and constructability as parts of the same conversation.

That is where a construction project can become something more: infrastructure that helps a healthcare organization serve its community for decades to come.