Time of transition

Health facilities professionals seeking a glimpse into the minds of their CEOs would have done well to attend last month's International Summit & Exhibition on Health Facility Planning, Design & Construction in Phoenix. The American Society for Healthcare Engineering event offered two plenary sessions featuring CEOs discussing the future of health care as it transitions to a value-based model and how this change will affect facility planning.

Health care futurist and panel moderator Ian Morrison laid out the mission health care organizations face, particularly as it relates to providing chronic care for an aging patient population: "It's not enough just to innovate, but to build a new model beyond the box of the hospital." Such a philosophy provides care through off-site facilities and even directly into patients' homes.

Within the hospitals themselves, Raymond Hino, CEO of Mendo­cino Coast District Hospital, touched on many themes with which Health Facilities Management's readers are familiar, including the need for better planning of departmental adjacencies, and efficiencies provided by modular construction. Adding that build-outs are no longer affordable, William Petasnick, president and CEO of Froedtert Health Inc., echoed the call for greater efficiency, saying, "We need to use our facilities better." He also said organizations need to operate on a 24-hour model, take advantage of technology and work toward more standardization of design and operations.

Neatly summing up the challenges for health facilities professionals, Larry Volkmar, CEO of Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center, concluded one session by saying hospitals must take care of the patients they have today — and the ones they'll have tomorrow — by being as flexible as possible to handle the transition.