2025 Evidence-Based Design Touchstone Award Recipients

UC Health saw an opportunity to enhance their patient experience by making changes to their main arrival entrance. A distinctive new entrance canopy now clearly defines the campus’ front door, whether people are arriving on foot from the parking garage or driving up to drop off or pick up someone. A diverse cohort of stakeholders from across the UC Health system participated, along with the design and construction team, environmental graphic design consultants, landscape architects, and researchers from KU and GBBN. A team from the Patient Experience department focused on the patient perspective.

The interior lobby and waiting areas were also transformed to create a strong, cohesive sense of place that is easy to navigate. The goal was to support intuitive wayfinding and deliver a best-in-class visitor experience. Literature reviews centered around the topics of (1) wayfinding and spatial navigation and (2) user experience in public spaces, with an emphasis on the wayfinding and waiting experience.

Post occupancy: A team of independent researchers conducted the post occupancy evaluation and shared the research findings with all stakeholders. The POE findings validated successful design elements and identified areas for improvement.

Operating in Northeast Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for more than 100 years, Bellin Health’s flagship campus, Bellin Memorial Hospital in Green Bay, was experiencing increasing patient needs. With many surgeries no longer requiring an overnight inpatient stay, Bellin Health had the opportunity to reimagine the patient experience and increase efficiency with a new, right-sized facility. This patient-focused and staff-centered Surgery & Specialty Center was designed with a merged approach using Lean methodology and an evidence-based design process.

During predesign, Lean methods leveraged retrospective data, Gemba walks, value stream mapping, and operational questionnaires. Concurrently, design researchers collected baseline data through staff shadowing, patient questionnaires, staff questionnaires, interviews and literature reviews.

More than 80 meetings were conducted with 100+ interdisciplinary team members throughout the project. During these meetings, design researchers leveraged the data and evidence, to guide conversations and inform decision-making leading to design interventions, hypothesized to better support patient experience and continuum of care.

Sarasota Memorial Health Care System’s new greenfield hospital provides this community with a new and convenient source of high-quality, advanced emergency and medical services closer to their homes in a welcoming, modern hospital environment. The inviting phase-one, five-story hospital includes 110 private, patient rooms, including eight leading-edge operating rooms, two C-section rooms, and two cardiac catheterization labs.

The vision was to provide a growing and aging community with new safety-net care services and high-quality healthcare. To accomplish this vision, the design had to support delivery of exceptional patient care, include flexibility to accommodate immediate and changing needs that could expand with future growth, provide resilient responses to catastrophic events, and maintain the system’s brand while creating its own unique identity. Since opening, a bed tower expansion has been completed to provide an additional 102 inpatient rooms in response to the growing community needs.

Rural healthcare projects have a tremendous impact on their communities but are often limited by smaller budgets despite a wider geographic and demographic reach. Redwood Hospital had a big vision to enhance their care delivery model and build a facility that could flex with patient volumes. They were seeking to combine their rural hospital and clinic into one campus and create efficiencies to help with critical staffing shortages. There is little precedent for rural hospitals that combine clinic services and seek to innovate their care model. A new model of delivery, the Universal Platform, (UP) was created to ebb and flow within several medical service lines. The UP was designed to support Observation, Emergency, Prep/Recovery, and OB triage patients without building beyond what the patient volumes and project budget could support.

Seeking to transform patient flows in a Critical Access hospital, this study evaluated existing conditions, documented process friction, and assessed the merits of the UP with shared, universally designed patient rooms. As there is little research published in this area, the architectural firm’s internal research grant supported this in-depth study for the pre- and post-occupancy phases. The post-occupancy evaluation findings identified operational advancements and further targets for process, people, and place improvements.

Waco Family Medicine is a Federally Qualified Health Center offering comprehensive health care services. It has more than a dozen locations that served 60,000 patients last year, primarily uninsured or underinsured patients, offering an income-based sliding fee scale. Waco Family Medicine's new 143,000-square-foot facility, which doubles the clinical space at its Providence Drive campus is evidence-based design at its best. The campus creates a clinical home that warmly welcomes vulnerable people in the heart of Texas, to support patient-centered, affordable community health, foster staff joy, and advance education and research across the clinical spectrum.

CoveTM Clinical Observation Vertical Exam challenges the idea that more space equates to better care. To meet increasing demands of emergency departments to do more with less, Cove was designed to evolve the way care is delivered in the emergency department by optimizing square footage without compromising function or patient, care partner, and staff experience. Cove is roughly half the size of a traditional exam room, increasing the number of low-acuity patients who can be treated. At the same time, this modular application reduces the time that it takes to implement the solution into existing and new facilities.

The mission of the Harris Health LBJ expansion is to improve health through the integration of education, discovery, and healthcare delivery. The new one million square foot, 12-story hospital expansion, is aiming to be the third Level 1 adult trauma center in the county. The design team has been tasked with creating a patient and family-centered facility that will meet the future needs of the growing community. The expansion would also address service gaps and provide more outpatient services along with expanded psychiatric care, behavioral health services, cancer care, heart and stroke care, and allow surge capacity in the inpatient units.

Indiana University Health (IU Health) is undertaking a large healthcare facility design project for a new hospital that will consolidate two existing hospitals within the health system (Methodist Hospital and University Hospital). The Clemson University Graduate Program in Architecture + Health and the Center for Health Facilities Design and Testing (CHFDT) collaborated with IU Health and its planning team of clinicians, administrators, and design professionals on the prototype design and systematic evaluation of the standardized inpatient room. The team utilized an EBD process, including review of the literature and multi-phase simulation-based evaluations of physical mockups.

Ren Ci Hospital located in Singapore was designed and built more than 15 years ago based on patient profiles and care models then. Many things have evolved over the years, including admitting frailer patients with more co-morbidities, more dementia and end-of-life needs. Additionally, the recent pandemic surfaced challenges about the design of the hospital, causing a need to re-evaluate and re-equip the building to be pandemic ready. An evidence-based/human-centered design approach was used to reconfigure the space to benefit the most important people - patients and staff.