Photo credit: Health Design Center.
The Health Design Center has been immersed in strategic planning for the past nine months. That’s why we’ve spent a lot of time exploring the current state of the healthcare design industry to better understand the role we can play over the next decade in continuing to drive innovation.
Innovation is one of those words that is easily used. Everyone wants to be innovative and knows when they see innovation, but achieving it is much more complex.
It requires not only seeing an area where change needs to occur, but also challenging existing belief systems, standards and solutions. That requires work.
Advances in healthcare design.
Looking back, the industry can be proud of the advances in healthcare design that we have imagined, cultivated, and launched new core expectations. When I started in this industry 34 years ago, it was not uncommon to see two to four patients in a room.
Today, you would be hard-pressed to find a new hospital design without single-patient rooms and ample space for family and care teams. We have also seen healthcare settings becoming much less institutional and focusing on engaging the family in the circle of care and providing them with reflective spaces.
And yet, as things have changed over the last quarter century, deep down, many things remain the same. A patient room from around the year 2000 would look a lot like the patient rooms we are designing today.
Still, we know that many other influences, such as new technologies, an aging population, and cost containment, will reshape the healthcare system, and with those changes comes a generational opportunity to change the healthcare spaces where healthcare is delivered. attention.
Foster deeper collaboration in healthcare design
So how can we, from a design point of view, continue to drive innovation? One way is through dialogue. For innovation to be sustained, it must create value and align with strategy. The Center has long advocated for design teams to meet as early as possible when a new project is conceived; It is difficult to support a strategy that you do not know.
The design community must also strive to find ways to forge deeper, ongoing relationships with healthcare leaders. The Center has created some collegial networks over the years to help facilitate this: the Pebble Project initiative, which brings together the design and healthcare communities to incubate and accelerate design innovation.
More recently, Environmental Networks help build bridges by bringing together diverse stakeholders to focus on practical resolution of current problems and thoughtful exploration of future solutions.
But these are small drops of water in a vast ocean. Project teams need to spend more time where customers are, listening to their pain points and better understanding the fundamental changes that will shape their future.
Local, regional, and national organizations such as Women in Healthcare, the American College of Healthcare Executives, and hospital boards of directors can help foster dialogue and inform industry professionals about where they can learn, contribute, and share.
And the Center will continue to find ways to keep these conversations going, sharing what we learn and the implications for the healthcare design community in the hopes that it can spark some new solutions in its work.
And we’d love to hear about the ways you’ve successfully engaged in meaningful conversations with the healthcare community and any new directions this may have given you. Reach out and share your stories and successes.
Debra Levin is president and CEO of the Center for Health Design. You can contact her at dlevin@healthdesign.org.
