Kristin D. Zeit

Andrew Quirk
Senior vice president and national director, Healthcare Center of Excellence, Skanska USA Building (Nashville)

Tammy Thompson, CLC, EDAC, M.Arch, NCARB
President and founder, Institute for Patient-Centered Design (Atlanta)

Joan Saba, AIA, FACHA, NCARB
Partner, NBBJ (New York)

Who she is: As partner-in-charge of all complex healthcare projects across the NBBJ network of offices, Saba, a 25-plus-year veteran of healthcare architecture, stays busy guiding and collaborating with varied teams on facilities around the world. She focuses particularly onacademic medical centers, teaching hospitals, and health-science centers. She’s also one of the founding fellows of the American College of Healthcare Architects.

One of the most talked-about programs after the 2012 HEALTHCARE DESIGN Conference was the Patient Experience Simulation Lab, a combination of a virtual-reality model and a full-scale mockup of a patient room–stocked with a real-live patient, family members, and a nurse.

I’m a big advocate of mentoring, and I’ve always done what I could to offer advice or make introductions when a young, passionate writer came to me with intelligent questions. So I was pleased to see a very instructive, positive conversation break out in our LinkedIn group, The Healthcare Design Connection, when a newly graduated architect posted a query about breaking into the healthcare niche.

As any year comes to a close, there’s a natural tendency to look back and assess what we’ve accomplished. And in the healthcare design realm, we accomplished a lot in 2012. As I think about some of the U.S.

Patient-centered medical homes (PCMH) —broadly defined as a way to organize primary care so that individuals get high-quality care across the full range of their health needs—are gaining momentum. The theory behind PCMHs is that when your care is truly coordinated between your primary caregiver and a team of specialists, and there’s a cradle-to-grave focus on preventive care and overall wellness, everybody wins: Costs go down, patients feel (and are) better cared for, staff is happier, and everyone is healthier.

Health Zone is a medically based health club operating as a for-profit division of Saint Francis Health System Related Health Service in Tulsa, Okla.

For years now, HEALTHCARE DESIGN has been recognizing the most influential people in healthcare, asking for your nominations and input and featuring the winners in the pages of the magazine. And this year, we’re taking it even further—with the introduction of The HCD 10. We’ve come up with 10 categories of nominees, to shine the spotlight across the broad spectrum of stars in our industry. Which architect is wielding the most power in the healthcare arena right now? What under-40 hotshot is wowing the field?

It was interesting to sit in the audience on the last day of the HEALTHCARE DESIGN Conference, listening to futurist Joe Flower prognosticate about healthcare, just hours before President Obama would win re-election.

In “Lessons Learned from Two Emergency Departments,” a session at the 2012 HEALTHCARE DESIGN Conference, Kathy Bell from S/L/A/M Collaborative and Wendy Weitzner from Innova Group launched right into a description of their work in expanding the ED for

The Elder Experience in Healthcare Settings: Following in Their Footsteps

by Kristin D. Zeit | Nov 4, 2012 | News