November 30, 2017

The Scoop

The Intersection of Art and Science

Each year, The Center for Health Design’s Board of Director’s selects a person or organization that has contributed to our field in a significant way and awards them the Changemaker Award in acknowledgement of their accomplishments.  This year the Changemaker Award went to someone who is a strong advocate for incorporating research into projects - Mardelle Shepley, FAIA, EDAC, FACHA, LEED AP BD+C. Mardelle is currently an associate director of the Cornell Institute for Health Futures, and has previously served as a professor at Texas A&M University (TAMU) and was director of the TAMU Center for Health Systems & Design from 2004-2014. She is a fellow in the American Institute of Architects and the American College of Healthcare Architects and is LEED and EDAC certified.

Dr. Shepley's teachings and practice illustrate how to tie hypothesis to design goals with the end result demonstrating the relationship between an objective and an outcome. She advocates that research is equal parts art and science, demonstrating how study hypotheses are directly related to design goals by illustrating the relationship between an objective and an outcome. As a result, her research is characterized by its translational content, generating data that can be directly applied to built projects. 

Although a full-time faculty member for the last 23 years, Dr. Shepley continues to be engaged in practice, and she encourages her students to participate in outside projects such as hands-on activities with Habitat for Humanity and conceptual design services for non-profit organizations. 

During the Changemaker Award ceremony at Healthcare Design Expo & Conference this year, longtime friend and colleague, Kirk Hamilton, PhD, EDAC, FAIA, FACHA, interviewed Mardelle who shared how her career started, what the future holds, and how she would like to be remembered. “Like most of us, I hope to have a legacy,” Mardelle stated. “In my case, I’d like that legacy to be that I’ve shared in the creation of a culture that recognizes that design is a responsibility. We must be held accountable for its results.”

Providing all of us with a lifetime full of teaching and community service, congratulations again to Mardelle, our 2017 Changemaker!

Debra Levin, EDAC
President and CEO

Industry News Briefs

The Reality of Designing Simulation Centers

The first time Stephanie Sudikoff, M.D., performed a breathing tube insertion, it was on a sick child. “It was terrifying,” she says.

As director of simulation at the Yale New Haven Health System’s SYN:APSE Center for Learning, Transformation and Innovation, Sudikoff is working to advance a model of clinical training that allows medical professionals to practice simulated health care scenarios before carrying them out in the real world, on actual patients. She also is associate clinical professor of pediatrics and pediatric critical care at Yale Medical School, New Haven, Conn.  

Medical simulation enables individual practitioners, medical teams and family caregivers to learn skills and techniques in safe environments that are similar in design to those in which they’ll deliver care.   Health Facilities Management, more . . .

Parkland Hospital ER Uses Purple Lights to Improve Patient Flow

When Dr. Fred Cerise, the CEO of Parkland Memorial Hospital, learned that Toyota was moving to Plano, he saw an opportunity.

He'd heard the car manufacturer has a philanthropic arm that helps nonprofits find ways to run more efficiently — for free. Cerise wanted to improve the public hospital's emergency room, one of the busiest in the country. It's a constant challenge to treat 500 to 700 patients each day in a space that holds only 118 beds.

From the beginning, Toyota didn't want to apply its expertise in assembly-line efficiency to medicine, which could hurt patients. So the Toyota team decided to tackle one segment of the many hours that patients spend in the ER: the "discharge time." That is, the time patients must wait between a doctor's discharge orders and the time they leave the hospital. If those minutes could be cut down, the bed would open up faster for a new patient, reducing wait times.  
Dallas News, more. . . 

The Center for Health Design hosted a webinar this year with Christine Basiliere, chief nursing officer and vice president of patient care services at Sharp Healthcare (San Diego) and Matt Richter, vice president, healthcare planner, at SmithGroupJJR (San Francisco) on the new Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center project in Chula Vista, Calif. The new hospital, which is scheduled to open in 2019, will include 138 private patient rooms (including 10 intensive care suites), five high-tech surgical suites, a versatile hybrid operating room, redesigned main entrance and lobby, and additional space for a pharmacy and kitchen.

Sharp is focused on creating a highly reliable hospital, based on the concept of a highly reliable organization (HRO), which focuses on avoiding catastrophes in an environment where normal accidents can be expected due to risk factors and complexity. For Sharp, this means focusing design efforts on decreasing the probability of an accident to make its systems and processes ultra-safe. Basiliere says Sharp aims to create a zero-harm environment for patients through its HRO.

While the HRO concept has existed for several decades in other sectors, such as the airline and power industries, it’s only recently entered the healthcare arena. In 2008, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) published the paper, “Becoming a High Reliability Organization: Operational Advice for Hospital Leaders,” which defined five concepts at the core of an HRO to ensure the safest environment for patients and higher quality care.
Healthcare Design, more . . .

Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Nears the End of Multiyear Expansion

The new Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, Palo Alto, Calif., scheduled to open in December, endeavors to pay tribute to the facility it expands upon, while incorporating modern medicine in a highly sustainable building.

Designers also took great measures to make being in the hospital as enjoyable as possible for staff and building. 

The 521,000-square-foot facility almost triples the size of the existing children’s hospital building next door and seamlessly reinterprets its terra cotta palette and use of stone from a Stanford-owned limestone quarry for construction, says Robin Guenther, principal, Perkins+Will, which designed the facility with architecture and engineering firm HGA.
Health Facilities Management, more . . .