This is an exciting time to be a researcher at The Center for Health Design (CHD). As research becomes increasingly incorporated into the practice of healthcare design, CHD is playing an active role to provide the bridge between research and practice. What is particularly exciting is that evidence-based design (EBD) provides the process and approach for making research come alive and become useful for practitioners.
Deep within the Mojave Desert, a two-lane road leads to an isolated U.S. Army base, where our nation’s soldiers prepare for war amidst the dry and sparse expanse that surrounds them. It’s on this site where a design team has been charged to offset the stark realities of that environment by creating a “medical oasis.”
“We are called to be the architects of our future, not its victims.”
—Buckminster Fuller
When Rockingham Memorial Hospital (RMH) officials committed to building their new facility in Harrisonburg, Virginia, as a “green” facility, they were largely forging new territory.
In my previous blog, “Is There No ‘I’ in BIM?”, I shared some tips from Michael Whaley, AIA, LEED AP, president/director, TURIS Systems LLC, regarding how building i
For Flad Architects, building a new emergency department (ED) for the staff of Mercy Medical Center–North Iowa meant building with the staff. Working within a Lean 3P quality system and utilizing a large-scale kaizen event, Mercy and Flad gathered a team of hospital employees and other stakeholders to design and build a full-scale model of the new ED.
Today, it’s a “do-more-with-less” world in healthcare. It gets even more complicated with funding shortfalls. How can today’s hospitals achieve highest value from their capital improvement programs despite inevitable spending barriers? It is a dilemma.
In the not-too-distant past, the climb up the corporate ladder for many executives included a couple of strategic relocations. Most companies assumed that for the right position, executives would move their families wherever the job required.
That assumption is no longer accurate. More than half (56%) of the respondents in the Atlas 2010 Corporate Relocation Survey reported instances of employees declining opportunities that required relocation.
Building information modeling, or BIM as we’ve all come to know it, has revolutionized the way hospitals are designed and constructed. But are its capabilities being taken advantage of fully?
Michael Whaley, AIA, LEED AP, president/director, TURIS Systems LLC, says no.
Green building without sustainable operations is like peanut butter without jelly. It’s like starting a race but not finishing. It kills me when I hear of “green buildings” that use mercury-containing products, clean with bleach throughout the site, or have not signed onto the Healthy Food Pledge.
The Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital expansion project represents an example of a facility that gets it.
The annual HEALTHCARE DESIGN Corporate Profiles and Rankings supplement offers results of our survey of architecture, engineering, and construction firms working in healthcare today. Please click here to download a PDF of the results, or use the attachment link below.
Speed to market. Reduced capital expenditures. Improved access to care. Enhancing the patient experience. These four driving forces are causing healthcare providers to re-evaluate how their strategic direction—including real estate strategies—can impact the bottom line, patient satisfaction, and overall care delivery.
