The new hospital building, the Tower, at Rush University Medical Center may only have opened in January 2012, but its status as a signature building on the Chicago skyline has already been cemented. With the distinctive “butterfly” shape of the patient tower, white-paneled façade, and multiple rooftop gardens, the new Rush is the latest—and largest—piece of a campus transformation that has been in the works for several years.
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The second installment of this four-part series discusses the challenges and techniques of identifying and prioritizing problems in design research. The ASHE Annual Conference's yearly codes and standards plenary session was given a new look Tuesday, with Chad E. Beebe, AIA, CHFM, CFPS, CBO, SASHE, director, codes and standards, ASHE, taking the stage as moderator with a sole goal of answering the questions top-of-mind for attendees. The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) is a national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patient satisfaction that is directly tied to hospitals’ reimbursements. Before setting out on creating a master plan for a facility, Jae Ebert, principal, project engineer, CMTA Consulting Engineers, says one must consider two objectives. The first, he says, is to recognize the importance of the master plan—including what it can do and what it cannot do, and, second, determine how to implement a strategy to keep communication open during the process. The ASHE Annual Conference & Exhibition kicked off Monday morning, with opening remarks from president Jeff Arthurs, CHFM, CHSP, FASHE and awards presentations at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio. Healthcare facility managers have their hands full, balancing the direct effects that forces such as healthcare reform, mergers and acquisitions, physician alignment, reimbursement changes, and IT infrastructure updates have on the buildings they operate. In its second edition of the Infrastructure 100, Infrastructure 100: World Cities Edition, audit, tax, and advisory firm KPMG recognizes what its panel of infrastructure specialists and professionals determined to be “the most innovative and inspiring urban infrastructure projects from around the world.” Throughout this three-part series, we’ll explore the topic of flexibility in architecture. The first article examined the main reason for flexibility: change. In this second article, we present three types of flexibility (adaptability, transformability, and convertibility) and how the healthcare field benefits from each. Minutes past a January midnight in 2007, my wife and I found ourselves in an ambulance heading for a prominent Dallas area hospital, projecting possible outcomes with hope and dread for the emergency delivery of our then 30-week-old son. As reported in the CHD Research Report in the June 2012 issue of HEALTHCARE DESIGN, the design features of the new wing at Trillium Health Centre-Mississauga site, which include decentralized nurses’ stations, larger patient rooms, and wireless technology, were evaluated for |
