CEE alum helps build healthcare industry, literally

Dan Labriola does not practice medicine and hasn’t discovered the latest cure of a disease, but this 1997 Illinois graduate has benefitted thousands of patients across Illinois.

In the 17 years since earning a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering, Labriola has been the project manager of seven major upgrades to healthcare facilities across the state, including the $37.5 million Jump Applied Research for Community Health Through Engineering and Simulation (ARCHES) Center at OSF HealthCare in Peoria.

That project is significant to the University of Illinois College of Engineering, who announced a partnership with ARCHES in February to “create new tools and technologies using imaging, health information technology, novel materials and human factors to enhance medical simulation and education at facilities like Jump.” The partnership was launched with a $25 million gift from Jump Trading.

Labriola is project executive for Pepper Construction, headquartered in Chicago. He is now turning his attention to a project receiving national attention, $500 million of improvements to Wrigley Field over the next four baseball off-seasons.

It was his connection to another sport, golf, which paid for his education at Illinois. Labriola received a Chick Evans Scholarship from the Western Golf Association, which provides full-ride tuition and housing for four years to worthy caddies across the country. He now sits on the Leadership Council for the Evans Scholarship Foundation.

Although a majority of the CEE majors at the time focused on design, Labriola chose an emphasis of construction management with a minor in structures. He says that his exposure to design, however, gives him a unique perspective when meeting with structural engineers.

“I speak the language and can have intelligent conversations with designers, structural engineers or geotechnical engineers,” Labriola said. “It hopefully brings the client a little more value than the average general contractor.”

Labriola pushed to be involved with healthcare building projects early on because he saw the benefit to his career and because of the challenge.

“Building hospitals is one of the most complicated assignments in the industry, next to building a power plant, because of the many systems in them,” Labriola said. “In addition, there are very few replacement hospitals that get built out in the green fields some place. They are typically horizontal or vertical additions or renovations.”

An addition to Edwards Hospital in Naperville is perhaps the most significant of his career from an engineering perspective. Labriola led construction efforts to add three stories on top of an active heart hospital. Because access to the building was limited to just one side of the structure, Labriola’s group had to enlist the help of one of the largest tower cranes in the country, one of only six of its size in the United States, and had to work with the architect to design pieces of precast concrete to work within the limits of the crane. The team needed to insert more than 100 holes into the roof while keeping the structure water tight, extend the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems up and down, take two existing elevators and extend them three floors and snake a new elevator down through the existing building.

It will certainly be hard to match the impact that the Jump ARCHES project will have, however. After more than 18 months of designing and planning, Pepper broke ground on the project in September, 2011 with the center opening 18 months later in April, 2013.

“Everything about it looks like a real hospital, although it will never see an actual patient,” Labriola said. “They have patient rooms, ICU Rooms and operating rooms, but there is also a back stage with the capability to simulate complex medical procedures and emergency scenarios.”

Operations are conducted using video simulation, mannequins or cadavers. They are recorded and critiqued in large conference rooms, which also have the capability to show live surgeries at OSF. There is a full apartment with an ambulance and the body of a helicopter inside the ARCHES Center to train EMTs on transportation of a patient to one those vehicles. Labriola’s team hung a 400-pound subwoofer from the ceiling to simulate helicopter and traffic noise.

“The project was very rewarding because it’s a place where top physicians, including those currently in practice, can learn,” Labriola said. “There are about a dozen medical simulation centers like this in the country, and I was lucky to a part of one. It’s a project that makes me very proud.”  

He is also proud of the partnership that his alma mater is making with the Jump ARCHES Center.

“When I heard the partnership was happening, I felt it made all the sense in the world,” Labriola said. “You’re taking a world renowned research institution like Illinois and matching it with a hospital that is doing cutting edge research to make sure their physicians are the most current. I feel connected to this from two different avenues.”