
Northside Hospital Gwinnett is the first hospital in the Southeast to install the award-winning STAAT ModTM (Strategic, Temporary, Acuity-Adaptable Treatment) units to care for COVID-19 and other critically ill patients. These units, designed by HGA and prefabricated and assembled by The Boldt Company, were some of the earliest solutions in the United States for expanding hospital facilities. The innovative STAAT Mod is highly engineered to hospital quality standards and easily flexes to provide traditional inpatient capacity or critical care. The units can be operated with or without airborne infection isolation rooms (AIIR) that provide increased safety for both patients and caregivers. The acuity adaptable rooms installed at Northside are a mix of critical care ICU, Airborne Infection Isolation (AII) rooms, and lower acuity spaces such as Step Down, Medical Surgical, and Observation rooms.
STAAT Mod units were constructed at The Boldt Company starting in August and shipped via semitruck to Northside beginning in September for final site installation. The first wing was opened for patients on October 21, 2020, with the completed 71-Bed unit being turned-over to Northside on December 7. The 46,983 SF of units connected to hospital infrastructure provide 71 patient rooms to care for a variety of patients.
“The Atlanta region is experiencing rapid growth and, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, we began looking at opportunities to increase our bed capacity and flexibility to handle an influx of patients” said, Debbie Mitcham, CEO of Northside Hospital in Gwinnett and Duluth. “In less than four months, we’ve been able to do what would normally take us 15 months, and this investment enables us to provide a quality and a durable solution to serve our community throughout the uncertain curve of this infection.”
The STAAT Mod has a 20-year life span, making it durable enough to support a hospital’s longer-term strategy and is fully code compliant. The space allows Northside the ability to care for a variety of patients without sacrificing clinical quality, safety, efficiency or the dignity of any patient.

“The STAAT Mod is an easily repeatable solution with infinite variations. It can be adapted and assembled in many different arrangements and answers the escalating demand for flexible treatment space as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic” says Kurt Spiering, principal and healthcare market sector leader at HGA, the architecture firm behind the design. “Within a few short months we had a 71-bed unit fully operational and ready to go. We need weeks or months to fabricate, ship, install and operationalize several inpatient wings. To build a new hospital would take years.”
The engineered, modular design of the STAAT Mod hospital-level care environments puts the safety of the patient and healthcare worker first while still accomplishing speed and capacity of other solutions.
The Boldt Company has been serving the healthcare market for decades, building hospitals and clinics nationwide. Boldt teams developed prototypes for modular construction and ramped up production in Spring of 2020 to meet the emerging need for treating COVID-19 patients.
“This is an instance when a capability that was developed over time, met with opportunity and resulted in innovation,” said Will Lichtig, chief of staff and executive vice president for performance and innovation at Boldt. “Building in a controlled environment allowed our team to standardize the process, maintain quality and safety, increase speed to market, and ultimately help save lives.”
Learn more about the STAAT Mod Solution, including renderings and product detail.