DMEI CAPITAL CAMPAIGN
The Vision
The Dean McGee Eye Institute physical plant is now 30 years old. Its most recent major renovation of clinical space was in 1993 with research space renovated in stages thereafter. It was designed in the renovation to accommodate only a fraction of the physicians, patients, and scientists that it now serves.
The Dean A. McGee Eye Institute’s success and accomplishments are now threatened by a critical lack of space. As the demand for our patient care services has grown, we have been forced to lease space in another nearby building. It is expensive, inefficient, and difficult, sometimes forcing patients (many elderly or visually disabled) to go back and forth from building to building to see different specialists and to obtain different diagnostic tests and procedures. Students, physicians, and patients do not have the full Institute resources immediately available to them. They lost the ability to bring colleagues in for quick and valuable consultations. This loss threatens DMEI’s ability to attract and retain the very best. Most importantly, there is no room to accommodate an ever increasing demand for Institute patient care expertise.
The scientific program is likewise jeopardized. We now house scientists in two buildings two blocks apart. Critical keys to our scientific success—daily collaborations, shared core equipment and research techniques, and interactions between PhD scientists and MD clinicians may be lost. Not only do we not have room to accommodate brilliant, productive scientific investigators who wish to join our faculty, but we lack the space for our existing scientists to expand upon their successes with new, innovative research.
The solution—a new, combined clinical and research facility joined to our existing building. The Institute’s Board of Trustees has been engaged during the past several years in extensive program planning to address DMEI’s current and future space needs. That study determined that construction of a new building was the best (and actually only) solution to the Institute’s need for between 50,000 and 60,000 additional square feet of research and clinical space.
What will this new DMEI facility achieve, and is it a feasible project? Construction of a new DMEI building will permit growth of the ophthalmology research, clinical, and educational enterprises. With additional space DMEI will be able to recruit to Oklahoma additional top quality scientists and physicians with highly focused areas of investigative and clinical expertise unavailable to patients elsewhere in the region. The project will also permit the incorporation of new scientific and patient care equipment to attract cutting edge scientists and to permit us to translate that research to patient care, enabling us to render higher quality, more sophisticated care.
The chosen architectural design is both cost-efficient and distinctive. It provides for a new 60,000 sq ft building joined to the current DMEI facility, prominently visible from all approaches. The building’s four new floors (research and clinical) will be linked to the existing floors with bridges that span a connecting atrium.
A wall extends northeast from the atrium and forms the north face of the new building. It also serves to screen the parking from the primary public entrance and from the street. The clinical/research floors are enclosed on the east with a curving glass wall and on the south with a brick wall matching the brick on the existing building. The new east entry provides access from the new upper parking deck. The natural grade of the site makes it possible to conceal the parking structure from the principal lines of sight to the new building.
Internally, floors one and two are assigned to clinical care and clinical research. Therefore, all patients and clinical staff will flow between those two floors in each building, connected by the atrium and its elevators and by the second floor bridge. Clinical space within the floors has been designed bearing in mind the special needs of our patients and the opportunities afforded by new clinical care technology. This will bring back within the Institute building all patient care services and permit about 40% future expansion of patient care services.
Basic research laboratories are located in the basement and on the third floor. This takes advantage of adjacencies to core facilities in the basement of the existing building (which will be further expanded) and isolates the basement laboratories from public traffic. Laboratories in the basement use an ‘open architecture’ concept allowing flexible assignment of bench space for maximum functionality. The third floor is assigned about 30% to clinical office and infrastructure space and about 70% to basic research space. Laboratories on the third floor include a mix of limited access (such as microbiology) suites as well as open architecture laboratory space. Unassigned expansion space for new scientist recruitment is present in the basement and on the third floor. Approximately 20,000 square feet of new research space will be made available through this construction, doubling Institute research capacity.
The total cost for this project has been estimated at nearly $25 million—including all design, construction, and equipment costs. When completed, DMEI will have the necessary facilities to sustain its role in education, patient care, and vision research. More importantly, it will leverage that support, utilizing its proven strategies to provide Oklahoma with a valuable and truly unique resource—and an Institute that will benefit not only our state but all who depend upon their vision.
DMEI’s future—your Vision
We invite you to share our vision—to make it yours. We invite you to transform today’s vision into tomorrow’s cures.
Your support may enable us to build a laboratory for a promising young investigator—or to recruit seasoned, proven, innovative and productive talent. It may purchase DNA microarray instrumentation, or it may equip a scientific computing center.
Your support may establish an eyelid reconstruction clinic, a clinical research center, or an expanded low vision center to serve patients with desperate problems.
Or you may wish it to meet unmet needs to complete a marvelous vision.
Regardless of the specific use, your generosity will empower other Oklahomans to have a dramatic impact on the lives of countless fellow human beings—some already threatened with vision loss and many thousands who will come seeking help in the years to come. And it may provide a place for two creative investigators to share talents and make the discovery that shatters old assumptions and enables the blind to see again.
If you are interested in learning more about the Dean McGee Eye Institute’s Capital Campaign, please contact the Development Office at DMEI-Development@dmei.org.