HCD Guest Author

Flooring sets the stage for all healthcare facility activities. It contributes to visitors' first impression of a space and shapes their opinions about an organization's ability to provide safe, high-quality, and comfortable care. Contributing both to a building’s structural integrity and healing aesthetic, flooring occupies every square inch of measured healthcare facility space, providing a major lifecycle investment opportunity to help realize positive healthcare outcomes, especially those outcomes now linked to reimbursement through healthcare reform.

Improving the health of the community has long been the priority of all healthcare systems in the United States. The goal of sustainable design is, in essence, the same. When the two intersect, patients, staff, and the community benefit.

How are three healthcare systems making sustainability work? Each told their own story at HKS Green Week, held April 15-19, including:

Since the 1980s, virtually every industry has downsized—except healthcare, which plows ahead like the seemingly invincible Titanic. Now, most industry analysts believe past methods for doing business are crumbling and major changes lie ahead. As past processes and paradigms fall under the critical forces of reform, will sustainable design be thrust aside as a marketing gimmick of the new millennium, or will it play a critical role in healthcare’s renaissance?

As our healthcare clients are exposed to unprecedented change and reform in 2013, they’ve realized there is cost pressure in everything they do. As a result, they’re planning and evaluating all aspects of their operations. This planning should include campus and facility master planning to understand the changing healthcare landscape.

In the healthcare reform era, systems will have to be more efficient, doing more with less, while at the same time caring for more patients. As a result, we’ll see several trends.

Fewer big projects, more incremental growth. In the last two decades, we’ve seen many new campuses and greenfield projects. With future cost constraints, healthcare systems will be more risk averse and return to the facility master plan.

I’ve always been enamored with how a great design solution emerges differently than a good one. The best-of-the-best solutions are often game changers, and the evidence-based design movement has fueled a few in the last decade. Unfortunately, we’re in need of a great design solution right now to assist our clinical colleagues who have sworn to “above all, do no harm” through their Hippocratic Oath.

"Plastics." That's the word Mr. McGuire tells young Benjamin Braddock in the 1967 film "The Graduate," insisting that there's a "great future in it … think about it."

Today, “nanotechnology” is the new plastics. Along with mobile technology, it’s the future of healthcare—and both are going to change how and where healthcare is delivered.

The goal of Lean design is to eliminate waste. This isn’t a one-time effort, but a never-ending journey of continuous improvement. To determine how the built environment can foster this type of performance and process improvement, you need to identify what waste is and where it occurs.

In “Designing for Daily Life with Dementia,” a Monday morning session at theEnvironments for Aging Conference

EFA 2013: Resident-Centered Care in China

by HCD Guest Author | Apr 8, 2013 | News

Since passage of the Balanced Budget Act (BBA) of 1997 to provide affordable access to healthcare in rural areas, critical access hospitals (CAH) have continued to grow in importance.

CAHs fill a unique niche in our national healthcare system. They share traits with larger urban hospitals—and often some resources and clinical expertise—yet they are tailored to their individual markets on a smaller scale.