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The digital transformation and levels of innovation at ever increasing speeds will continue to impact healthcare facility design throughout the United States. A key question for the industry is how the built environment will support and respond to these rapid changes in healthcare.
Healthcare will continue to be the design issue of the decade. Healthcare architects will be obligated to enhance the patient experience and improve the clinician experience simultaneously as we strive to reduce construction costs without impacting quality of care.
The increased use of telehealth, robotics, and artificial intelligence in Healthcare will help bridge the gap.
There have been numerous articles written about the positive impact of robotics in medicine, such as those used in surgery. The benefit to the patient is to have less intrusive major surgery which becomes an overnight or outpatient activity. Just a decade ago, the same procedures would have required four or five days of recovery in the hospital.
Medical care teams, made up of everyone from the doctors, nurses, assistants, pharmacists, specialists, transitional care teams, to even education classes, will have the benefits of computerization and artificial intelligence guide people, treatments and follow ups efficiently and effectively, being proactive in medical treatments. Programs and apps will guide people thru a process and eliminate the “fell thru the cracks” moments. Additionally, artificial intelligence will improve safety and reduce unintended medical reactions from conflicts between multiple medical providers. In the near future, DNA testing of individuals will improve the selection of medicines by being able to anticipate reactions to medicines, based upon analytical data, in lieu of trial and error. The business and financial implications of healthcare improvements call for additional purchasing of the technologies indicated, but also for drastically adjusted medical building designs.
The future of healthcare also looks compact! One such changes on the horizon are micro hospitals which could only have fifteen beds in the facility. They will start to emerge in rural areas and even suburban and urban markets.
These facilities support the larger hospital facilities by providing rapid turnover treatment in a hospital setting while simultaneously improving the patient experience. These facilities will decompress major medical institutions for the most severe and elaborate cases. By virtue of its size, the micro hospital can provide lower cost care for patients when compared with traditional hospitals. By virtue of technology, a patient can receive the same sophisticated medical treatment formally required within a major medical facility. The difference between a free-standing ER and a micro hospital is that a micro hospital can admit and provide more than emergency care treatment. A micro hospital is a more comprehensive medical treatment facility.
Since the business of medicine is part of every medical organizations bottom line, it is less expensive and less of a financial strain to construct a micro hospital for 30 million dollars in lieu of a full-scale facility for well in excess of 120 million dollars.
At the end of the day, micro hospitals might be the medical construction disrupter as healthcare connects with patients and provides the appropriate level of care at the appropriate cost.
