Making informed health care design decisions

Welcome to the newest of our growing roster of e-newsletters aimed at various segments within Health Facilities Management’s broad community of readers.

As its name implies, HFM Design News is directed at health facility planning, design and construction professionals with news, features and technical information of specific importance to them in a quick, easy-to-use format.

In this inaugural issue, we look at a few ways that observational evidence and actionable data can help the design process.

Our top feature takes a look at the strategies behind health care designs that improve patient safety. Architects and interior designers have used imaginative floor plans, innovative interior finishes and the latest technologies to move beyond their previous goal of doing no harm to adopting evidence-based approaches that actually help to prevent accidents.

Evidence also is a key element of our second feature, which delves into the roles of statistical research and Lean concepts in hospital space planning. Data, such as emergency department arrival times, can be captured and put into an understandable picture through simple histograms, charts and spreadsheets that can inform the programming design process. The results, the author says, are more efficient health care facilities.

The next feature looks at making data-informed decisions from yet another angle. In this piece, the author explores product performance information that can be accessed by interior designers in situations where evidence-based design research is lacking. She posits that product testing results can be used for interior finishing materials and will help match an appropriate product to a given application.

Also in this issue, we provide an article on using prefabricated and modular elements in hospital construction projects and an overview of hospital furniture design trends as well as news stories, project updates and links to recent research.

We hope you will enjoy HFM Design News and pass this e-newsletter along to your colleagues in the health care planning, design and construction field.