Single-occupancy rooms. Lush indoor gardens. Soothing water features. Private conference rooms. Ample outdoor views. Such amenities, more commonly associated with four-star lodging, are increasingly commonplace in the new health care facilities that are sprouting with dandelion-like prolificacy in the built landscape.
“These aren’t your parents’ medical office buildings,” notes Larry Pobuda, a partner in Stewart Lawrence Group, a Bloomington-based real estate investment and development firm. “If you look at medical office design today, you’ll see cutting-edge design and architecture. There’s a lot of very creative work on both the exterior and interior of these buildings.”
Yet these next-generation design sensibilities don’t merely represent a collective “sprucing up” of hospital and clinical settings. Rather, they’re intentional structural and environmental features commissioned by health care organizations and designed by architects, who are dipping into a fast-filling pool of research that affirms the ability of design to improve patient care. In other words, in the same way that doctors inhabiting these buildings employ “evidence-based” medicine to treat their patients, so too do architects now lean on statistical data related to patient outcomes, staff satisfaction, infection rates, and other issues to build healthier, more patient- and practitioner-friendly medical facilities.
“If you think back to the 1950s and ’60s, when the bulk of our hospitals were built, hospitals were thought of as body shops—machines,” explains Rick Hintz, principal in the health care practice of Perkins + Will, an architecture firm in Minneapolis. “The design was all approached from the perspective of throughput and efficiency. What came out of that was an architecture that was fairly sterile, cold, and clinical. Over the past 15 years or more, there has been a fairly radical reaction to health care environments—to the betterment of the patient and the patient experience. We’re now seeing fabulous examples of what can be done to humanize the experience and, ultimately, improve patient outcomes.”
Learning From Mistakes
This move towards evidence-based health care architecture was inspired, in large part, by a heart-rate accelerating report released in 1999 by the Institute of Medicine, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit research firm. The report tallied the human and financial toll inflicted by medical mistakes. The institute revealed that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans died annually as a result of medical errors. The staggering loss of life, in turn, cost the country as much as $29 billion in health care, disability, and lost income.
That was shocking news. The upshot, though, was that the Institute of Medicine advocated for the health care industry to focus not on rooting out individual mistake-makers, but, instead, learning from system-wide errors and devising strategies and best practices to correct them. “I think what you’re seeing today from health care organizations is that they’re approaching new buildings and construction as an opportunity to look at different operational models for the way they do things,” says Terri Zborowsky, director of health care education and research for architectural firm Ellerbe Becket in Minneapolis.
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