Optimize Your Healthcare Project with Progressive Design-Build
Proven strategies to streamline complexity and protect your investment
Health system leaders are balancing a lot – from delivering world-class patient care to staff satisfaction and navigating critical investment decisions – all while tackling challenges like material shortages, competing stakeholder priorities and tight budgets for their capital projects.
Unlike traditional delivery methods that sometimes lead to fragmented teams and misaligned priorities, Progressive Design-Build offers a better approach— one proven to bring owners, designers and builders together from the start, aligning scope, budget, and design with your vision. It is pivotal to helping you optimize your investment, enhance collaboration and alignment, while maintaining operational continuity.
In fact, a 2025 Design-Build Study, from FMI Corp, a consulting firm dedicated to the AEC industry, uncovered 40% of healthcare projects in the Pacific Northwest region rely on Progressive Design-Build as their preferred delivery method, and this number is only gaining momentum. The study highlights that Progressive Design-Build provides higher levels of flexibility and fewer risks due to early collaboration.
How Progressive Design-Build Helps You Achieve Better Outcomes
- Drives Early Alignment and Smarter Decision Making
This collaborative delivery method fosters transparency, flexibility and shared accountability, allowing you to have the data you need to adapt to challenges while maintaining control over costs and timelines – minimizing the risk of rework. Research shows Progressive Design-Build significantly reduces time overruns compared to traditional methods, ensuring smoother execution and more informed decision-making. When engaged early as your trusted partner, you gain proactive problem-solving expertise and 70 years of industry-specific lessons learned with Mortenson—so you can focus on your day job of delivering exceptional patient care.
At Harborview Medical Center’s OR & Sleep Clinic Relocation, Mortenson utilized Progressive Design-Build to align stakeholders early by defining success measures through team workshops and tracking key performance indicators on accountability scorecards. By continuously evaluating budget impacts during design, we maintained financial transparency and agility—ensuring our customer had the information needed, at the right time, to drive better decisions and deliver an on-time project within the $23M budget.
- Protects Your Investment with an Integrated Team
Trust and transparency are the foundation of Progressive Design-Build success. The advantage is a team with established synergy—one that works seamlessly together with little to no learning curve, enhancing collaboration and efficiency from day one. This integrated partnership fosters a shared commitment to your project’s success, ensuring every stakeholder treats your investment as their own.
At Harborview Medical Center’s Cart Wash & Central Sterile Expansion, Mortenson delivered a 15% budget savings to the customer by identifying critical needs and focusing design efforts where they mattered most. The proactive planning mitigated structural challenges early in design, reduced noise and vibration impacts, and prevented costly delays—earning the project the DBIA 2020 Healthcare Facilities National Award.
- Ensures Seamless Execution with Local Expertise
We know navigating city and county requirements, permitting and other building compliance processes can be challenging. Mortenson’s early engagement allows you to better leverage extensive local relationships, streamlining day-to-day operations and driving project efficiency.
"These types of projects demand another level of shared accountability – and we work really hard to achieve this with our design partners here in Seattle. Partnering with a team that understands your vision and has a proven history of working together, automatically sets all of us up for more success and fewer surprises along the way." Tamara Hartner, DBIA Assoc, LEED AP, Healthcare Market Executive, Mortenson.
At UWMC Northwest’s Gamma Knife project in Seattle, Mortenson utilized extensive healthcare experience to maximize opportunities during the design phase which eliminated unplanned disruptions, compressed the schedule and ensured the safety of patients and caregivers during construction. Our understanding of local regulations and processes maximized our ability to minimize all disruptions on campus before construction even began.
Bigger Results with Progressive Design-Build
While the Pacific Northwest has been at the forefront of the shift toward Progressive Design-Build, leaders in other markets across the US are beginning to embrace this delivery method to realize lasting financial and operational benefits.