Posts from the ‘Healthcare’ Category

Healthcare Design 09 Conference

Jason, Stephen and I just returned from the Healthcare Design Conference in Orlando on Wednesday. We had a busy weekend touring hospitals in the Orlando/Daytona area and went on to two days of meetings early in the week. The conference is growing. This year there were 2,600 attendees. Some observations:
• The Florida hospitals we saw were all very nice with a high level of amenity and very focused on patient centered care. These hospitals cost about half what we experience in California. The hospitals are highly competitive and amenity is a big factor in consumer choice.
• At the same time there were a number of Evidence Based Design initiatives in the hospitals there was a noticeable lack of sustainable design. The building exteriors (throughout Florida) had no external shading or orientation specific response. The interiors and systems had very little apparent concern for energy conservation or sustainable materials. While one architect from a firm’s New York office wrote a prominent book on sustainable healthcare architecture and spoke at the conference on those topics, her colleagues could not speak to any of those sorts of initiatives in their Florida projects.
• I went to some very good roundtables and education sessions. The access to the people leading the charge and publishing on Evidence Based Design was just great. I found the smaller roundtables to be most engaging.
• There were two distinct groups at the conference, the researchers and the implementers. The researchers were from the largest firms, hospitals and universities. The implementers were primarily architects and those administering hospitals and healthcare facilities. The researchers spent more of their time talking about methodology and process while the implementers were hungry for ideas that they could design into facilities.
We have some new resources:
• Evidence Based Design for Multiple Building Types; EBD moves beyond healthcare, just a little
• Research Laboratories: a logical extension of the healthcare world
• Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture
• HERD: Health Environments Research and Design, we now subscribe to this journal
These books and journals will reside outside my office on the counter or in the Healthcare Studio. Some good books on Sustainable Healthcare Architecture and the Visual Resource for Evidence Based Design. Alan says “check them out”