This episode of The Future Built Smarter explores the evolving landscape of healthcare design and engineering with guest Eric Vandenbroucke, Vice President of Healthcare at IMEG. “2025 started with a lot of optimism, but it’s definitely been a roller coaster,” he says.

Despite uncertainty in the market amid potential federal reductions in Medicare reimbursements, Eric says many healthcare clients remain focused on sustainability initiatives. “Healthcare contributes about 5 percent of global emissions,” he says. “Owners are committed to reducing their carbon.” Resiliency and future proofing are also critical. From extreme weather to human threats, resilience demands a layered approach, including redundant power, onsite water storage, and cybersecurity. Vulnerability assessments set the stage for creating future-proof plans. “The biggest thing we can help clients with is understanding the state of their building or campus and what its vulnerabilities are,” Eric says. “Healthcare facilities need to be operational—period.”

Security is a top concern as well, especially in the wake of increasing threats like active shooter incidents. “We take a holistic approach,” says Eric, stressing that security requires much more than just cameras and guards. Key additional components of an all-encompassing security plan include employing the principles of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) and personnel training, including tabletop exercises. "No one wants to deal with these events, but being prepared makes a huge difference," Eric says.

Technology, of course, is the main driver of innovation for healthcare facility operations, clinical operations, and delivery of care—all of which need to communicate with each other and be interoperable. “We’ve moved beyond siloed systems to a smart system approach,” says Eric. “Alarms, patient monitoring, building automation systems, command centers, medical records, real-time location solutions, robotics—all of those things and more have to work together.”

As for artificial intelligence (AI), Eric says, “Where we are at right now in the industry is just the tip of the iceberg. Our clients are now using AI for clinical documentation, predictive analysis, optimizing their revenue cycle, using chatbots for scheduling, triage, and patient education. On the AEC side, AI is going to be a big tool for design assist. At IMEG we've developed our own AI system that helps us increase our design efficiency and accuracy. We've also developed many tools within Revit and Power BI to help with that efficiency and accuracy, and with coordination. And we continue to grow and expand the use of our virtual reality and augmented reality tools. It’s all very exciting.

“Technology and trends are going to continue to influence healthcare care moving forward. That’s one of the cool things about healthcare: It’s never the same. It's always evolving.”

This episode of The Future Built Smarter features Robbie Jones, an IMEG project executive and mechanical engineer who led the firm’s design of the new Advanced Engineering Building at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas—ENR’s 2024 Best of the Best Project in the higher education/research category.

The Advanced Engineering Building (AEB), located in the university’s “Innovation Corridor,” is designed to foster innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration within UNLV’s Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering. The AEB supports growing enrollment, education, and research in robotics, cybersecurity, biomedical engineering, energy and water, and artificial intelligence. The three-story, 52,000-sf building features wet and dry labs, classrooms, a maker space, an outdoor aviary for drone testing, and a flexible auditorium or “flexatorium” that can be used as a lecture hall or event space.

IMEG provided MEP and technology design for the facility, which also will aid start-ups in Nevada’s growing tech industry. To ensure the MEP design would meet the needs of the university, Robbie, a UNLV engineering graduate, met with several engineering department faculty members—some of whom had been his professors when he was a student.

“Never in a hundred years would I have thought that I would be designing an engineering building for UNLV,” says Robbie. “I was excited about doing it, and it was a cool thing for me … kind of a feather in my hat. I've done some billion-dollar gaming projects, and I think this is one of my favorite buildings.”

Read the IMEG case study to see photographs of the AEB and learn more about the engineering design. For a tour of the building, watch this UNLV video.

In this episode of The Future Built Smarter, Abby Coleman discusses IMEG’s use of immersive extended reality experiences, 1,300 of which were provided by the firm to project stakeholders in 2024. “Extended reality is an umbrella term for virtual reality and augmented reality,” says Abby. “I essentially use those technologies to help our clients and engineers visualize their design before anything is even built.”

As IMEG’s Innovation Extended Reality Specialist, Abby also incorporates VR and AR technology into the firm’s engineering workflow to revolutionize the design process and bolster IMEG project team collaboration. “Whether reviewing a critical space or evaluating workflows, both the engineers and clients will be able to make confident and well-deformed decisions,” she says. Overall, she adds, immersive experiences help accelerate the decision-making process, reduce the number of costly revisions, and optimize project outcomes.

IMEG’s immersive experiences are utilized in many markets and for different purposes. Among the 1,300 experiences of the past year, Abby singles out an experience in which IMEG designers “sat” on a hospital bed within a 3D model of a patient room to determine the optimal size and number of footwall digital display screens, based on the patient point of view. In a similar vein, higher education project stakeholders “sat” in various locations of a conference room 3D model to determine the best locations and number of projector screens, again based on the end users’ perspective. And in an augmented reality experience, an engineer inside an existing mechanical room saw how a new chiller and its piping, as designed, would fit in the space.

Floor plans, the AEC industry’s traditional medium for communicating designs to clients, cannot truly represent a space. IMEG’s immersive experiences, however, are created using the firm’s robust 3D models, which provide spatial awareness and understanding. “When we're able to put a client in a headset, some of the feedback is like, ‘Wow, now I understand this design. I know how it feels.’ “

In the future, Abby foresees every engineer having a VR headset on their desk and “essentially just using that on design from start to finish.” She also expects to see “VR more heavily incorporated with our client engagement,” with the annual number of stakeholder immersions exceeding last year’s 1,300 experiences. She bases her predictions on extended reality’s proven ability to bridge the communication gap between designers and clients.

As she says, “I believe that VR is a universal language of design.”

Watch IMEG extended reality experience videos of a patient room, conference room, and job site.