Insights & Solutions

Behavioral Health-Strategic Facility Design Innovations that Improve Treatment Outcomes, Safety and the Bottom Line

 

The best hospital design plans are only as good as the processes and systems they support. What this means when it comes to patient throughput is that a well-thought-out built environment needs to have well-functioning services and policies in place to ensure that things run in a truly optimal way. One way to do this is to include the “right” people in your efforts from the very beginning onward.

What message does your Emergency Department (ED) send to patients who step through the doors? If it isn’t a comprehensively welcoming one, you could be increasing patient and family stress levels before they’ve even begun assessment or treatment. As overcrowding in EDs and awareness of the consequences grows within the healthcare industry, it’s crucial to begin taking steps to improve your care environment for staff and patients.

It’s the little things that matter when it comes to the message you are sending your patients and their families. In other words, the better your waiting rooms and public spaces look, the louder the message you’ll send to your audience that you care about them, their comfort, and their safety.

How far do you go to involve your patients as a valued part of your organization? The answer may become increasingly important over the next few years. In the current healthcare climate, accrediting bodies and insurers are expecting providers to step up their efforts to design their care models in such a way as to encourage patients to take an active role in their own medical care.

When you think of your organization’s setting, you probably focus on its visual and functional aesthetics. But do you also connect the design approach to the logistics of the communication that occurs in the space? If not, you could be missing some very real opportunities for improvement, since research reveals that the two can be closely linked.

As the focus in healthcare hones in more and more on that all-essential interaction between physicians and patients, you’ll want to be more aware of how your design choices facilitate such meaningful communication.

With technology serving up even more state-of-the art advances in patient care than ever before, many hospitals are incorporating these IT improvements into their operations to create a virtual feast of high-quality offerings.

Take the Sutter Medical Center of Santa Rosa, California, which just opened its doors in October of 2014. The organization spent $284 million to construct a brand new, high-tech facility that incorporates the latest and greatest IT tools and capacities and uses them to achieve the highest-quality standards of care and treatment.