Insights & Solutions

Life in most healthcare organizations passes at a rapid pace. Sounds familiar, right? And in the frenzy of the moment, you probably find that opportunities for your staff to communicate with one another are often overlooked. Yet such internal communication is essential for efficiency, safety, and consistency in patient care. So how do you find that balance without tipping the scale?

When you think of your organization’s setting, you probably focus on its visual and functional aesthetics. But do you also connect the design approach to the logistics of the communication that occurs in the space? If not, you could be missing some very real opportunities for improvement, since research reveals that the two can be closely linked.

As the focus in healthcare hones in more and more on that all-essential interaction between physicians and patients, you’ll want to be more aware of how your design choices facilitate such meaningful communication.

When you think of your communication goals, they’re probably focused on promoting your healthcare organization broadly within your community. Of course this is an essential ingredient in attracting highly qualified staff and building patient volume. But did you know that it’s also just as important—if not more so—to develop an internal communication strategy?

With technology serving up even more state-of-the art advances in patient care than ever before, many hospitals are incorporating these IT improvements into their operations to create a virtual feast of high-quality offerings.

Take the Sutter Medical Center of Santa Rosa, California, which just opened its doors in October of 2014. The organization spent $284 million to construct a brand new, high-tech facility that incorporates the latest and greatest IT tools and capacities and uses them to achieve the highest-quality standards of care and treatment.

As the Children’s Hospital at the Anschutz Medical Campus in Colorado has recently discovered, being a technologically advanced facility doesn’t mean you have to take a high-tech approach to your design elements. In fact, just the opposite is true at this pediatric hospital, where the most important goal is creating a nurturing environment that can help young patients to heal so they can go home faster.

How do you incorporate the latest technological advances into your design efforts? If you’re like most healthcare organizations today, the newest electronic tools and offerings are probably taking center stage in your modernization plans, helping to lead the way toward achieving better outcomes.

Your Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores reflect your patients’ views of the cleanliness of your facility. Yet their visual perceptions might not match the reality of your environment.

Antibiotic-resistant infections have become a major public health issue in the United States. In other countries, however, the problem doesn’t appear as severe or as widespread. It’s worth taking a look at what they’re doing differently to see what we can learn from their efforts.

In today’s demanding healthcare marketplace, your design choices need to do double duty. They need to reflect your mission to prevent the transmission of germs in your facility while also incorporating a patient-centered care approach to help people feel at home in your units.

But this raises a serious question: Can safety and comfort co-exist? The answer is a resounding “yes.” Many modern facilities are finding creative ways to integrate both missions seamlessly so patients and staff reap the full benefits.

Hospital-acquired infections (HAI) and other easily transmittable diseases are a serious concern in most facilities today. Implementing some of the latest best practices in your physical environment can help to minimize their impact—and help you get the best outcomes from your efforts.

When exploring design options that can help to prevent HAI and keep other infectious diseases from spreading, here are three key factors to consider: