Roper St. Francis Healthcare broke ground Friday on a data center in North Charleston that will hold the health system’s medical records and images in a building designed to ride out a Category 5 hurricane.
Health system executives, city officials and project leaders turned the first shovels of dirt on the 24-acre site in Palmetto Commerce Park, off Ashley Phosphate Road, according to the City of North Charleston.
The building will cost $10.5 million, part of an $18 million project cost that includes the land, The Post and Courier reported. The city said the center is expected to open in early summer 2013 with a staff of 10 to 15.
“With information technology at the forefront of national healthcare discussions the timing of this project is perfect and it is no accident,” said David Dunlap, president and CEO of Roper St. Francis, according to the city. “This data center will provide the muscle behind Roper St. Francis Healthcare’s long-term strategic plan.”
Out of the parking garage
Dunlap said the idea took shape at a lunch meeting a few years ago, when fellow executives suggested moving the system’s critical data out of the parking garage of Roper Hospital and into a freestanding center, The Post and Courier reported.
“At that time it was just a vision,” Dunlap said at the site Friday, according to the newspaper. “I think this is the realization of that dream today.”
The new center will consolidate 40 tons of equipment that provides electronic communications to more than 100 Roper St. Francis facilities across a nine-county area, said John Holloway, chairman of the Roper St. Francis Foundation’s board and chairman of the data center project, according to the city.
“This isn’t just about computer servers and wires, it’s about computerized physician order entry, decision support systems and coding for the administration of medications,” Holloway said.
Dunlap said electronic medical records are becoming fully integrated at the system’s facilities and doctors’ offices, and the center will add capacity for the system’s communications, bringing greater efficiency for the almost 300,000 people Roper St. Francis serves each year, the city reported.
Built for storms and earthquakes
The concrete, tilt-wall building will measure 17,000 square feet including its mechanical yard, according to the city. The Post and Courier described a 16,000-square-foot data center that will sit 47 feet above sea level.
The city said the structure is designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, with 160 mph winds, and an earthquake beyond what building codes require. Mike Taylor, vice president and chief information officer of Roper St. Francis, said that design will reduce the risk of a catastrophic failure.
“This building, in the most severe earthquake, would sink an inch and a half,” Taylor said, according to The Post and Courier. “That’s West-Coast-type standards.”
The data center will connect to the rest of the system through two redundant rings of fiber optic cable that stretch 67 miles, the newspaper reported. Executives said it will support doctors as they order tests and share patient data, help staff give medications safely, scan for risks and push updates to a patient portal.
“Everything we do has a clinical component,” Taylor said.
“We chose the Palmetto Commerce Park site because of the utility services available there, the accessibility and the inland location,” Taylor said, according to the city.
Who is building it
Clayco Inc. is the design contractor, the city said. Sixteen local companies and eight regional subcontractors from North Carolina and South Carolina are providing subcontracting services.
“Palmetto Commerce Park in North Charleston was determined to be the perfect location for this important Roper St. Francis project,” North Charleston Mayor R. Keith Summey said, according to the city. “We are excited to see the construction phase get underway.”
A busy corridor
The data center is the newest project on Palmetto Commerce Parkway, which was extended a year ago and has quickly filled with construction sites, The Post and Courier reported. The Roper site sits next to the Charleston County Consolidated Dispatch Center, which is nearing completion. Immedion, a managed hosting services company, plans to open its third South Carolina data center a few hundred yards down the parkway this summer, and Safelite is building a manufacturing plant farther down the road, the newspaper reported.
The project also adds to a run of data center construction in the Lowcountry. The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center opened a 20,000-square-foot data center in Hanahan in October, and Google is performing final testing on its second $600 million data center in Berkeley County, The Post and Courier reported.
“Once this road opened, we all knew it would take off,” said City Councilwoman Rhonda Jerome, according to the newspaper.
Roper St. Francis runs Roper Hospital on the Charleston peninsula, Bon Secours St. Francis Hospital in West Ashley and Roper St. Francis Mount Pleasant Hospital, which opened in November 2010.
