Nicole Reese Impacts Patients through Design

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Nicole Reese believes that she and her team at Intuitive Health have the power to design and build facilities that make a difference in a patient’s life. The strength of that belief stems from a personal experience: she was diagnosed with cancer in 2021. Reese found herself sitting in cancer centers that she helped design, pondering the elements that worked well and the ones that didn’t.

“You have to go through chemo, and you sit in one spot for usually six to eight hours, so it’s about making that space feel as comfortable and welcoming as possible,” says Reese, who spent her career building residential homes, strip malls, and banks as well as leading projects for hospitals.

That experience continues to influence the way she approaches her role as director of planning, design, and construction at Intuitive Health, where she spearheads the construction of facilities that house urgent care and emergency room treatment options under one roof. The facilities connect patients to the appropriate care with the right prices.

“Right now, if you get sick or break a bone, you need to make a decision to go to urgent care or go to the ER. But if you go to the ER and you really needed urgent care, they’ll treat you but will charge you expensive ER prices,” she explains. “At our facilities, you can come no matter what the symptom is; we’ll triage you and say, ‘You’re an urgent care patient, so go here and get charged urgent care prices.’ Patients shouldn’t have to pay or go to the hospital if they don’t need to.”

Building those cutting-edge facilities has prompted Reese to work with partners who allow her to focus on the company’s patient-centered vision. One of those partners is Beltmann Integrated Logistics, a nationwide provider of distribution, transportation, installation, and project management.

“Beltmann’s services have been a stress reliever on a number of projects,” she says. “I can send everything to them to be inventoried, and they’ll bring it to my site. It’s a huge time-saver, and they save me a lot of nit-picking.”

At the core of Reese’s work today and throughout her decades-long career are deep needs to build things and to help people. The latter need has driven her to be a mentor to young construction professionals, especially women who wish to thrive in the male-dominated industry. In her role, she finds ways to give them experience and the confidence to work among their male counterparts.

“Women in the industry sometimes question their abilities, and it’s hard for them to stretch into that next role,” she says. “But women have to learn to be thick-skinned and to walk the walk and talk the talk. You have to be able to relate with the people you work with and talk to them on their level.”   

It’s a surprise to hear that Reese didn’t grow up wanting to work in construction, judging from her career success. Her interest started with side projects around the house and taking her son to open houses on Sundays to admire the architecture. When it came time to find a career, she wasn’t too sure what she wanted to pursue. Her husband suggested that she try working with a general contractor. She gave it a try.

“It started out with just simple stuff like framing and painting and whatever they needed, just to help out as a laborer, and I picked it up pretty quickly,” she says. “I liked being able to see a product and go, ‘I did that.’”

Reese quickly rose the ranks, prompting her to go back to school to get a degree in architecture from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. She went on to create her own construction company and then her own architecture firm until 2008, amid an economic crisis that hit the industry hard. The crisis didn’t stop her from finding other opportunities, though.

For the next two years, she worked as a project architect at the McCarty Company before making her way to Cookie Douglass Farr Lemons Architects and Engineers from 2011 to 2013. The next few years saw her take on leadership roles in the healthcare industry at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, ERDMAN, and McKesson.

Reese says each chapter of her career journey gave her an opportunity to be able to relate to every level of a construction organization. “There’s different levels of people. There are laborers, CEOs, and everywhere in between,” she explains. “Being one of the people out on the construction field and in the office, I understand how they think [and] how to relate to them on their level.”