APPLETON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – To handle medical surges across the United States, The Boldt Company, based in Appleton, is building mobile intensive care units.
“For about the last year, we’ve been working on prefabricating exterior wall components, prefabricating interior wall components on a lot of projects that we’ve had running in the upper Midwest,” Dave Kievet, The Boldt Company COO, said.
Then, COVID-19 hit the United States.
“We just took the design we were using to modularize some of the inventory care centers and we converted it into how we might do an isolation center to treat the need, which was treating acute care coronavirus patients,” Kievet said.
The Boldt Company partnered with HGA architects to build modular intensive care units for COVID-19 patients. It took less than a month from concept to finished product. Faith Technologies and Tweet Garrot are partners for specialty contracting.
Boldt Company Executive Vice President Ben Bruns tells FOX 11…..
“The first hospital production is going to take about two weeks to build, and fit out and get ready to ship. We think at some point in the future it’ll be down to about three days.”
How can they do it so fast?
“We can use lean fundamentals to reduce build times of every single part and piece that we do.”
Bruns says these units are different from other solutions like converted shipping containers.
“It’s a true airborne infection control isolation environment. So we’ve got merv filters on the inlet air and hepa filters on the outlet air. So you could put this in a convention center and it would be fine. The air that goes out is infection controlled.”
The Boldt Company says that will keep both patients and healthcare workers safe, while helping hospital surges.
“They can be daisy chained together to literally have as many beds as you can fit on a specific piece of land,” Bruns said.
The first shipment of these rooms will be going out this weekend to a customer on the East Coast.
The Boldt Company says building these prefabricated units costs less than building with conventional construction. A 16-bed module sells for roughly $4.4 million.
The company says no local hospitals have purchased modules.
You can see animations of the modules and learn more information here.
