December 15, 2016

The Scoop

Reflections and
Heartfelt Thanks

As the year comes to a close, it’s an opportune time to reflect on the twelve previous months, think about all you have accomplished and be proud for a few moments before you leap headfirst into 2017.

At The Center, we are proud of the new website we launched last year and how it has helped to make the tools and resources we have created and collected over the past two decades more readily accessible and easier to search for just the right tools or resources to fit your immediate need.

We saw some long-time employees move on to new roles in the industry, grateful they have stayed connected to The Center, and welcomed some new and amazing members onto our team.

We said goodbye to long-term board member Jain Malkin, who has served this organization since it started its work almost three decades ago, yet know she will never be far as an emeritus board member.

We added almost 1,000 references and 300 key point summaries to the Knowledge Repository thanks to the support of our partners the AIA AAH, ASHE, FGI, NIHD and Research Design Connections. 

And we launched a fourth room type in the Insights and Strategies tool, connecting evidence-based design strategies to specific spaces in a highly interactive way.

These are just a few of the highlights of 2016, for a broader list see this year’s holiday card. 

Most of all, as the year comes to a close, I want to thank The Center staff and the many volunteers who help bring this work to fruition each year, as well as the sponsors and foundations that support us and make it all possible.  And I’d like to thank all of you for your support, engagement and encouraging words as well as your thoughtful critique throughout the year that keeps us going and helps us to continue to get better at what we do. 

Wishing you all the happiest of holiday seasons, good health and great adventures in 2017.

Debra Levin, EDAC
President and CEO

2017 Trends in Healthcare Special Report

The innovative work that hospitals and health systems do often gets buried deeply in the media talking points about health care reform — if it ever gets mentioned at all. The fact is that many health care organizations as well as researchers and others allied to the field have been advancing innovation at a brisk pace for quite some time now.

Care delivery is being transformed while quality is improving in many areas.

Noteworthy innovations are occurring in hospital design and construction, infrastructure, infection prevention, materials management and elsewhere. Technology is certainly helping to accelerate improvements in the care environment, but the painstaking work of ideation, product development and forging partnerships, employing root-cause analysis practices and process improvement principles often is just as foundational to these advances. Health Facilities Management, more ...

Post Occupancy Surveys Yield Clear Lessons

What Health Care Designers Can Learn from the Retail Industry

There are more than 1,900 retail-based health facilities in the United States, and they treat more than 10 million people each year. The location factor — health care services set in a venue where consumers already go for everyday needs — certainly gives them leverage. But, as Sarah Bader, principal at architectural firm Gensler, writes in "Retail design strategies for health care," retail health providers have to find new ways to compete in a competitive marketplace. One way to do that, she says, is to create consumer-focused facilities by adopting retail design strategies.

Her advice? Be accessible, specific, clear, nimble, virtual and visible. But, are retail health clinics the only ones that can benefit from this strategy? Whether a patient is walking into a CVS Minute Clinic or a conventional health facility, all patients are thinking more like consumers as they pay more for their health care with each passing year.
Health Facilities Management, more . . .

Engineers Operating in Healthcare Facilities Tackle Unique Challenges

Engineers tasked with working on hospital and medical campuses find themselves tackling unique challenges: evolving technology, increased specialization, and maintaining operations while under construction. In this interview, professionals with experience on such facilities share advice on how to finish projects that report a clean bill of health.

What's the No. 1 trend you see today in the design of hospitals and medical campuses?

Eric Reuther: We are seeing our hospital clients become more interested in providing redundancy for their mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) systems. This has ranged from more emergency power requirements to more demand for emergency cooling. We are being asked to provide additional redundancy in HVAC systems design so that spaces can remain functioning even throughout a power loss or equipment failure.

Larry Anderson: We continue to see the convergence and integration of technologies into the infrastructure of hospitals. For example, data from the nurse call system can be used to collect information on call times. The data can then be used to support a hospital's consumer assessment of health care providers and systems (CAPHS) score. There has been an increase in wireless communications infrastructure within hospitals to support connected medical devices along with patient and family mobile devices. Many connected medical devices can now directly populate the patient's medical record and the hospital's security systems.
Consulting Specifying Engineer, more...

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