The American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE) this month is releasing a new handbook to serve as a guide for healthcare facility commissioning.
For anyone not immediately familiar with commissioning, it’s essentially a process through which an assessment can be made as to whether building systems are operating as intended.
The American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE) this month is releasing a new handbook to serve as a guide for healthcare facility commissioning.
For anyone not immediately familiar with commissioning, it’s essentially a process through which an assessment can be made as to whether building systems are operating as intended.
We here in the offices of Healthcare Building Ideas (HBI) and sister publication HEALTHCARE DESIGN (HCD) always value the opportunities we have to travel to conferences and trade shows, as well as to visit firms and tour facilities, to get a little bit closer to those industry professionals we cover and provide information for on a daily basis.
The operation and maintenance of facilities is something our readers are dealing with every day. However, doing so in an efficient way that improves performance is another matter.
ASHRAE just released a new guideline offering facility managers and building operations staff guidance on building optimization to achieve “the lowest economic and environmental life cycle cost, without sacrificing safety or functionality.”
Earlier this month, I got a good reminder of what this industry is capable of achieving during a session at the ASHE PDC Summit in Phoenix. And I think there are a lot of attendees who would join me in saying so after listening to the session “Innovative, Collaborative Project Delivery at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.”
Over the past decade of conflict, tens of thousands of America’s wounded have been injured in combat. One of the success stories of battlefield medicine advances is the increased rate of survival from injuries that, in previous conflicts, resulted in death. The survival rate for U.S. service members wounded in Iraq has reached 90%, higher than in any previous war, according to www.miltary.com.
Would a midtown New York City Rolls Royce dealership fronting a four-story parking garage be a likely candidate for conversion to a clinical research laboratory? Apparently so. When Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC) decided to demolish its on-campus research laboratory and relocate more than 200 staff person to a more state-of-the-art facility, the dealership/garage was seen as offering the best opportunity.
Have you ever had another driver cut you off, closing in on the reasonable gap you purposely kept between your car and the car in front of you? It might make you question the quality of that person’s driving education.
This same question can be asked about what we are teaching our young professionals about the quality of design, when the pace for our design delivery has exceeded all reasonable caution. In the last 10 years, a flurry of work caused the industry to speed up the pace—but at what cost?
When George Verghese, MD, made the decision to open his new dermatology practice, the Mid-Atlantic Skin Surgery Institute in Waldorf, Maryland, he knew he wanted his office to reflect his commitment to quality.
“The physical space in which I practice is just as much a reflection of me as is the actual care I provide my patients,” Verghese says.
When I started implementing sustainable operations in healthcare more than 20 years ago, I was frustrated by leadership’s need for research when I felt a “gut check” was more than enough. I didn’t need a research study to tell me that a safer environment engages workers, that dollars were going out the back door in the waste stream, that red bag reduction saves money, or that eliminating mercury from cantor tubes reduced mercury spills. I knew it because I lived it.
There has been a subtle but noticeable shift in the healthcare design industry’s understanding and acceptance of evidence-based design (EBD). EBD is becoming a more mainstream process for designing healthcare facilities, demonstrated by both the growing number of EDAC-certified individuals and the inclusion of EBD in requests for proposals for new projects.
My time here at the ASHE PDC Summit is coming to a close. It’s been an interesting few days in Phoenix, and I’ll be sharing more with all of you over the course of the next few days once I return back home to Cleveland.
Initially, my overall take-away from this conference is that as the planning, design, and construction community, we all need to brace ourselves for what the future of healthcare holds and build facilities that reflect that.
