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September 29, 2016
The Scoop
Report predicts health care's major trends, challenges for 2017
Each fall, the American Hospital Association publishes its Environmental Scan, a succinct forecast of the major trends that will impact health care organizations in the coming year. The report uses a variety of research data points to reflect on issues underlying trends in such areas as consumer habits, technology, public policy and more.
Much of what’s in this document speaks directly to senior leadership at member hospitals, but there are also many great takeaways for those who design, build and maintain America’s hospitals.
For example, you can find important observations about what’s shaping the way patients are and will be receiving their care — from traditional health care spaces to retail locations. The report also highlights important facts about challenges the health care community faces in behavioral health. The report notes that more than half of U.S. counties — all rural — have no practicing mental health clinicians.
Health Facilities Management, more...
DOE Surveys Nurses on Patient Lighting
As part of its effort to support the development of next-generation healthcare lighting, the U.S. Department of Energy developed an online nurse survey that was administered by a nonprofit healthcare organization that manages multiple hospitals in the Pacific Northwest. Nurses at four hospitals answered questions about the lighting in the patient room where they most often worked. The primary goal was to determine what’s needed in an ideal patient room lighting system, with a secondary goal of identifying opportunities for increasing energy efficiency.
Nurses with varying ages and years of experience completed the survey. They worked in a newly constructed children’s hospital, an older hospital with some renovated patient rooms and two older hospitals (one urban and one suburban). The nurses rated and ranked the aspects of lighting that helped or hindered their performance of tasks, and rated the quality of the lighting in different areas of the patient room. They also indicated whether or not they used supplemental lighting and, if so, what kind they used.
Illuminating Engineering Society, more...
‘Living Walls’ Can Play Significant Role in Tackling Toxic Air Hot Spots in Cities
A report called Cities Alive: Green Building Envelope, reviews green infrastructure schemes across five global cities; London, England; Los Angeles, California; Berlin, Germany; Melbourne, Australia and Hong Kong, China to quantify the benefits of green building envelopes. It is the fourth report in the ‘Cities Alive’ series which looks at ways to help shape a better world.
The report shows that the contribution of green building envelopes, such as moss and vegetated walls, vertical farming and roof gardens, has been underestimated.
Worldwide, 3.7 million premature deaths in 2012 were attributed to exposure to poor air quality. Approximately 200,000 of these were in Europe and 900,000 in Southeast Asia.
Green envelopes, often dismissed as “architectural window dressing,” can reduce localized air pollution by up to 20 percent in some locations, rapidly reducing toxic air at street level.
Medical Construction & Design, more...
Simulation Center Brings New Ideas to Life
Health tech incubator MATTER in partnership with OSF HealthCare launched the OSF Simulation Stage, a flexible simulation environment designed to allow early-stage health care technology innovators to test their products in real-world clinical environments and gain valuable feedback. This is MATTER’s second specialty environment dedicated to spurring collaboration between entrepreneurs and clinicians to advance health care. Its first, the AMA Interaction Studio, was opened in partnership with the American Medical Association.
The OSF Simulation Stage’s first configuration will model a hospital observation room and is the setting of a six-month challenge among developers to innovate technologies to improve the efficiency, quality and financial stability of hospital observation units.
“Simulation provides an invaluable opportunity for testing, training and iteration in a safe and controlled environment,” said John Vozenilek, M.D., vice president and chief medical officer for Jump Trading Simulation & Education Center, a partnership between OSF HealthCare and the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria. “The friction involved in bringing new health care technologies to market is immense, and it’s often doubly hard for early-stage innovators to navigate the health care system to secure crucial pilots and gain direct feedback. The OSF Simulation Stage at MATTER eliminates this friction by accelerating the testing process and paving the way for outside evaluation to shape new ideas and iterative decisions that might not otherwise not be uncovered until much later in the process – or missed entirely."
Health Facilities Management, more...
Lessons In Inpatient Unit Design
Only a few years had passed between the opening of Cooper University Hospital’s Roberts Pavilion in Camden, N.J., and the need to fit out two shell floors to add med/surg inpatient beds. Still, the project team didn’t want to simply duplicate the same design without first looking for new ideas and areas for improvement.
For example, in-room computer stations weren’t popular at the time of the original design but had become an industry standard since the pavilion opened in 2008. During interviews with the staff, designers at EwingCole, which oversaw both projects, learned the centralized nurses’ stations on the inpatient floors were another point of dissatisfaction.
“They felt it kept them away from patients,” says Mary Frazier, a principal at EwingCole. Additionally, the two workstations were located on the edges of the unit near the entrance and rear. “Sometimes, the staff would break them down into one side where the nurses sat and the other would be where the clinicians sat,” she says. Healthcare Design, more...
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