Amit Bhansali Interview | Engineering Future-Proof Healthcare

Currently chief mechanical engineer on a major hospital project in the US, Amit Bhansali shares his thoughts on how engineering flexibility and resilience into healthcare settings is helping to future-proof health services in a fast-moving world.

Global | Tuesday, 20 February 2024
Reading Time : 7 minutes

What inspired you to be an engineer and what do you like best about it?

Believe it or not, as a kid, I wanted to be a singer! My mum encouraged me to become an engineer as I was good at maths, and when she passed away, I wanted to honor her wish. I love interacting with people and engineering gives me the chance to do that, which is what drew me to singing in the first place. I still get to sing too - when I get together with friends for karaoke.

I specialize in mechanical engineering, but I’ve also got a working knowledge of electrical and plumbing. At this point in my career, I’d describe myself more as a chief problem solver – helping to resolve any issue to do with buildings we are working at.

Working in the healthcare sector, we’re not just designing buildings where people work, we’re creating places that make people well. We bring our collective expertise together to not only bring our client’s vision to life, but also to provide a place for care in the community. I knew from a young age that I couldn’t be a doctor, I didn’t even want to dissect a frog at school but being an engineer in the healthcare sector gives me an opportunity to have a meaningful impact on people’s lives in another way.

Amit Bhansali

Senior Vice President, Mechanical Engineering

United States

Contact

Sarah Cannon Cancer Center

What’s helped to shape your career and what advice would you give aspiring engineers?

I did my undergraduate degree in India and my thermodynamics professor encouraged me to progress to a Masters. I followed his advice and was awarded a full scholarship to study at Oklahoma State University (OSU) in the US. Energy efficiency was just taking hold, so I opted for the building efficiency programme. It solidified my understanding of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) mechanical systems and is now a huge part of my role at WSP.

I left Oklahoma with five job offers, including junior scientist. It was my professor who told me, if you want to see the things you do get implemented, go into the practical side of consulting. That’s exactly what I wanted, so I took my first job at a consulting group in Dallas.

My first week involved walking around with a ladder at night looking at fire and smoke dampers opening and closing on buildings. I asked my boss why I was doing something so simple after all my study. It was him that instilled in me that doing the small things and understanding how they integrate is what makes you a better engineer when it comes to the bigger things.

I’ve always valued the guidance he gave me and now I say the same thing to my young engineers. If you want to be a great engineer, you don’t have to be good at everything right away, you’ll learn on the job. It’s the attitude to learn and being responsible that will set you apart. I also find that people who are self-motivated and self-reliant are more successful. Alongside the training you’re given, keep developing your own skills, not just because it’s part of your job, but because you want to be successful.

What bigger projects have you gone on to?

I was chief mechanical engineer on the Sarah Cannon Cancer Center project in Plano, Texas, the first hospital in the US to earn the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED) v4 Gold certification for sustainable performance. One of the energy-saving features we designed was the cooling and heating system, which is now 21% more energy efficient than the baseline required by building regulations.

Right now, I’m chief mechanical engineer on one of the biggest hospital projects in the US. We’re designing it to allow for future electrification – with systems that provide the infrastructure for healthcare facilities to switch everything to an electric source when it’s available, including electric-powered steam for things like hot water, sterilization and humidification.

Prefabricated MEP racks were used to help reduce waste, improve productivity, and help the project meet its sustainability goals.

Healthcare projects must come with a lot of challenges?

Our challenge as engineers is to design systems with the flexibility and resiliency to take care of people’s changing health needs for the decades to come. For example, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, WSP helped a lot of hospitals redesign their air systems to ensure only fresh air could circulate. Since then, it’s become more of a design practice in readiness for future incidents, such as another pandemic.

As engineers, we’re trained to handle the technical challenges and as your experience grows, so does your knowledge of systems. Personally, I think the bigger challenge in building consulting is working with so many stakeholders and managing their different expectations, from building owners, architects and contractors to hospital staff and Authorities Having Jurisdiction. It’s challenging, but it also makes what we do more fun and interactive.

What do you think has been the best innovation in the built environment?

I’d say it’s the robustness in controls and sensors we have now. They’ve come a long way and there’s a lot more innovation happening to integrate, monitor and control systems in a built environment. Artificial intelligence will take controls to the next level, learning from how a building operates to manage things like heating and cooling cycles, to optimize building performance and supercharge energy efficiency. You can decarbonize energy, but without controls you can’t manage the way it’s used in buildings effectively and efficiently.

As engineers, we want buildings to perform in the way we’ve designed them. One of my proudest moments was when we did an energy analysis a year after the Sarah Cannon Cancer Center (Plano) opened, and it showed that the building was performing very close to how we’d intended. Before, it’s all just numbers. When it happens, you get a real feeling of accomplishment.

Amit and his family visiting Arcadia National Park in Maine, USA

What do you think makes a place, and where’s your favorite place?

People. In healthcare, we’re working for the community good, and if we keep that in mind, we’ll always have the sense that we’re involved in something bigger than ourselves, regardless of the day-to-day frustrations along the way. Understanding people and how they work together is the backbone of any project and makes us better engineers. There’s a lot of stakeholders to consider in our projects, including building owners, patients, medical teams, support staff and vendors, and it’s our job to ensure the places we create work smoothly for everyone.

Personally, my favorite place is wherever my family is, but I also love the US’s national parks and travelling around India, as that’s another home for me. I’ve also got a soft spot for walking around universities, maybe because I’ve never stopped learning. One of the things I like best about working at WSP is helping other people in their careers. If I can keep my own people happy and developing as engineers and leaders, then I can deliver for my clients.