New projects coming together

One of the great honors for Health Facilities Management magazine is presenting the winners of the annual American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE) Vista Awards to our readers.

Not only do the awards celebrate some truly striking planning, design and construction (PDC) projects, but they offer behind-the-scenes examples of professionals from all branches of the hospital PDC community working together to devise innovative plans and solve real-world problems as they move through the various phases of a construction plan and achieve a successful outcome.

As one winner described the journey: “You get done, everybody’s happy, it’s working great, it looks terrific and you’ve developed a lot of friendships during the course of the project because everybody was on the same page, working together.”

Whether they won for a new construction project, a hospital renovation or an infrastructure upgrade, the professionals who worked on Baystate Health, Hospital of the Future, Springfield, Mass.; Mercy St. Louis 2nd Floor Women’s Health unit; and the South Georgia Medical Center power plant replacement, Valdosta, Ga., have stories that are worth telling.

Indeed, according to this year’s Hospital Construction Survey, conducted by Health Facilities Management in cooperation with ASHE, many health facilities executives are dealing with new construction, renovation or infrastructure projects as they attempt to make sense of the somewhat amorphous shape of the hospital of the future.

More specifically, the annual survey takes a closer look at how hospitals are moving many functions off campus and how these same hospitals are repurposing spaces previously used for inpatients to make room for administrative, ambulatory, observational, behavioral and rehabilitation services.

The future development of health care facilities also is addressed in a couple of other features in this edition of HFM Design News.

For instance, our third article delves into the world of facility planning with a tutorial that shows health facilities professionals how to assess their facility portfolios and make changes to bring their operations up-to-date with the aims of population health. And, in our fourth feature, we discover how interior designs can help to answer the challenges of an aging population.

The modern health care organization is changing at a speed scarcely believable only a few short years ago, and its underlying physical structures are host to a wide variety of new projects as health facilities professionals work to accommodate these changes.