Designing the Swiss Army Knife of Hospitals
CHALLENGE
A large regional health system completed a master plan indicating the need for the construction of a new community hospital to support rapid growth in the market. Targeted to open with 66 inpatient beds and expand to somewhere between 200 and 250 beds, the hospital will connect to an existing free-standing emergency department and imaging center that opened several years ago. While the community has been clamoring for a new hospital to reduce excessive drive times to the next closest hospital, determining what clinical services would be located on the campus would be partially determined by the state’s CON process. Adding further complexity to the project was the fact that the clinical users engaged in the planning process were accustomed to working on a clinical campus nearly 10 times the size of the new campus.
Co-creation sessions to establish project and campus success metrics
Baseline strategy validation
Operational analysis
Patient consumer demographic analysis
Patient consumer experiential analysis
Provider consumer experiential analysis
Travel distance studies
Parking planning
Co-creation sessions to explore the patient consumer journey
Co-creation sessions to explore the provider consumer journey
Design innovation co-creation sessions
Key room + space programming validation
Departmental adjacencies + building stacking
Building concepts
Clinical design peer review
APPROACH
With speed to market a major driving factor for the overall project success, the project approach was designed to proactively address many of the common delays and lessons learned during facility design projects. A series of enhanced programming sessions focused on specific clinical conditions and programs focused on validating everything about the new campus, including:
scope of services
volume projections
clinical + diagnostic technologies
care models
physical and virtual linkages to other sites of service
staffing models + competencies
The process of validating all aspects of the campus program highlighted topics that, if left undecided until later in the design process, would delay the project and result in rework and increased project costs.
Co-creation sessions with health system leaders and clinical end-users resulted in patient journey maps detailing their navigation of the care process. These maps informed critical adjacencies, building stacking and design innovations intended to create a maximally flexible environment.
RESULTS
Currently in advanced phases of design, the project has been funded by the client. Occupancy is targeted for late 2024.
A number of design elements targeted for inclusion in the final design include:
shared pre-/post- procedural areas to reduce staffing requirements and room requirements
location of procedural environments inside the surgical care to facilitate seamless programmatic expansion
dedicated cancer center entry to ensure social distancing for immunocompromised patients
expansion zones for all clinical areas and programs targeted for future growth
building circulation models nearly eliminating intersections of visitor circulations from all other circulations in the building