From outbreaks of deadly viruses to devastating super storms to terrorist attacks, hospitals are on the front lines when natural or man-made crises hit the communities they serve. The result is an incredibly complex challenge for this industry: how to build healthcare facilities that are designed to withstand myriad what-if scenarios. In this special report, Healthcare Design digs into the complex wrinkles of planning, designing, and building for resiliency and disaster preparedness, offering takeaways on approaches that will remove some of the guess work from responding to the unknown.

In the series of articles listed below, we dig into topics including risk assessment and data analysis techniques, case studies on projects built for resiliency and those that survived disaster scenarios, and various regulatory and strategy considerations. Disasters will happen, and our healthcare infrastructure can be ready.

  • Using Data In Resilient Design
    Healthcare Design talks to Amir Rezaei, high-performance building analyst at CannonDesign, about how his role contributes to the design process and why using data can help ensure project teams are building the right resilient structures.
  • Designing For Seismic Survival
    Located between two distinct fault lines, Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Palmer, Alaska, was designed to seismic standards that were tested in a November 2018 earthquake.
  • ROI Of Resiliency
    A recent report outlines key strategies that healthcare organizations might explore to capture the benefits of resiliency and rebound more quickly in a crisis.
  • Innovating Disaster Response
    In addition to the winner of Healthcare Design’s Breaking Through conceptual design competition, two other submissions that explored how to respond to disaster events more efficiently and effectively.
  • Creating An Emergency Plan
    As the entry point for a hospital’s response to many types of crisis scenarios, emergency departments must develop disaster preparedness plans that cover all scenarios.
  • Setting The Standard
    Doug Pierce, director of Perkins+Will’s Resilience Lab, and Julie Frazier, senior medical planner at Perkins+Will, update the industry on progress made since USGBC formally adopted RELi, a resilience consensus standard developed by Perkins+Will and the Institute for Market Transformation to Sustainability (MTS).
  • Coastal Considerations
    Given a unique location on the coastline, the new ED and surgical tower at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Fla., are designed to embrace flexibility and resiliency.