Public-private partnerships: A case study of the Omaha Veterans Affairs Ambulatory Care Center

Nearly 40,000 veterans are treated in Omaha annually.  The new $86-million, 157,000-square-foot, Omaha Veterans Affairs Ambulatory Care Center is a three-story facility which includes seven primary-care clinic, an outpatient surgery suite, a radiology suite, a women’s health clinic, and a specialty medicine clinic allowing 400 additional outpatients to visit the clinic each day. The outpatient facility connects via divided a corridor to the main 12-story hospital built in 1950, which continues to provide inpatient services, administrative offices and medical services.

The Omaha Veterans Affairs Ambulatory Care Center is the first in the nation to take advantage of the C.H.I.P.I.N. for Vets Act. This federal law passed by Congress in 2016 allows the VA to accept private donations to complete construction projects and requires the builder to use innovative delivery techniques that fall outside federally prescribed specifications and methods. From subsurface utility mapping, virtual design & construction that helped bring the design to life and other advanced technology throughout design and construction to using a design assist subcontracting approach instead of a hard-bid approach, this complex project not only met its ambitious budget and schedule expectations, it is saving taxpayers roughly $30 million through a public-private partnership (P3) model that uses donations from the non-profit Veterans Ambulatory Center Development Corporation (VACDC).

The design team has now been selected for the second CHIPIN for Vets Act project in Tulsa, currently in Schematic Design and will share how they’ve implemented lessons learned in Omaha for the Tulsa project.