The 2026 Healthcare Design Conference + Expo, to be held Oct. 17-20 in New Orleans, will host more than 100 keynote and educational sessions on a variety of topics.
Healthcare Design is previewing some of the upcoming educational sessions in a series of Q+As with speakers, sharing what they plan to discuss and key takeaways they’ll offer attendees.
Session: E94 – “AI: A New Partner in Healthcare Design — From Conceptual Design Through Occupancy”
Tuesday, Oct. 20, 1:15-2:15 p.m.
Speakers: Nilay Deshmukh, senior associate and senior medical planner, NBBJ (Boston); Steph Atavilla, senior director for transition and occupancy planning, Boston Children’s Hospital (Boston)
Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving quickly from experimentation to practical application across the healthcare facility lifecycle, spanning early planning through transition and occupancy. This session explores how AI-enabled tools can optimize design decisions alongside clinical operations, improving outcomes while reducing risk.
The speakers will examine how AI-enabled analytics can accelerate clinical programming, sharing examples that integrate operational data, staffing models, and throughput assumptions to inform space planning and adjacencies. Attendees will also learn how predictive modeling and AI-supported workflow analysis can help teams evaluate patient, staff, and material flows early, helping them identify inefficiencies and operational risks before they are embedded in design.
Healthcare Design: What developments have you seen recently in the use of AI for healthcare design and planning?
Nilay Deshmukh: The biggest development is the shift from experimenting with general-purpose AI tools to using AI as a practical, project-specific partner.
Initially, much of the attention focused on generating images or text. Today, the more significant opportunity is using AI to work with the complex information that shapes healthcare projects: operational data, clinical requirements, meeting records, space programs, room data, regulations, design documents, and lessons from previous projects.
AI can help teams organize that information, identify patterns, compare alternatives, retain decisions, and detect potential conflicts. Work that once required many hours of searching, sorting, formatting, and cross-referencing can increasingly be accelerated or partially automated.
This does not reduce the importance of architects, planners, clinicians, or facility leaders. It changes where their expertise is applied. The project team can spend less time moving information and more time understanding users, testing assumptions, resolving trade-offs, and making informed decisions. AI becomes a new member of the team—but professional judgment and accountability remain human responsibilities.
HCD: Where do you see the greatest opportunities for AI to help healthcare teams?
Steph Atavilla: One of the greatest opportunities is creating a shared project intelligence that connects information traditionally held in separate places.
Healthcare organizations have data about patient volumes, utilization, staffing, turnaround times, travel distances, schedules, and future growth. They also have valuable knowledge embedded in staff interviews, workflow observations, meeting notes, and operational policies. AI can help bring these inputs together and translate them into planning questions and design scenarios.
For example, a team could test how changes in procedure volume, staffing models, room turnaround time, or hours of operation affect the number of rooms required. It could compare different departmental relationships or workflows and identify where travel, waiting, handoffs, or congestion might occur.
The AI’s value is helping the team see assumptions and consequences earlier—before the program and building geometry become difficult or expensive to change. That allows clinicians, operators, and designers to have a more informed conversation about capacity, adjacencies, flexibility, experience, and cost.
HCD: What emerging applications of AI in transition and occupancy planning are on your radar?
Atavilla: The transition from design and construction to clinical operations involves thousands of interconnected activities. Equipment, technology, staffing, training, policies, regulatory approvals, move sequencing, and construction completion all need to converge before opening day. AI has the potential to help teams see and manage those dependencies more clearly.
One emerging application is using AI to create dynamic readiness maps that identify incomplete activities, conflicting information, and downstream risks. AI can also help transform approved project information into role-specific training materials, orientation guides, simulations, and checklists so that different staff groups receive information relevant to how they will work in the new environment.
Scenario-based simulation is another promising area. Teams could use AI-supported exercises to test patient arrivals, emergency situations, equipment failures, staffing shortages, or other opening-day challenges before they occur.
HCD: Why is quality control important when integrating AI tools in the design documentation process?
Deshmukh: Healthcare projects contain an extraordinary number of interconnected requirements. AI can assist quality control by comparing room data sheets, equipment lists, plans, schedules, specifications, consultant documents, meeting decisions, and owner requirements. It can flag missing information, conflicting quantities, outdated decisions, or conditions that warrant further review.
However, AI-generated findings must also be quality controlled. AI can miss an issue, misunderstand context, or confidently produce an incorrect conclusion. Effective strategies include limiting the tool to verified project sources, maintaining an audit trail, using defined review criteria, and keeping qualified professionals responsible for final verification.
HCD: What’s one takeaway from your session that you want attendees to remember?
Deshmukh: AI should not be viewed simply as a faster way to produce what we already produce. Its more meaningful potential is to help healthcare project teams see, test, remember, and challenge information throughout the project lifecycle.
The question we hope attendees will ask is not only, “What can AI do?” but also, “What can healthcare architects, planners, clinicians, and transition leaders now do better because of it?”
Atavilla: Used responsibly, AI can give teams more capacity to explore alternatives, identify risks earlier, preserve knowledge across handoffs, and focus on the parts of healthcare design that require creativity, collaboration, and professional judgment. AI is a new partner—not a replacement for the people responsible for creating safe, effective, and humane healthcare environments.
Find updates and additional information on the 2026 HCD Conference + Expo here.
