Davis Partnership Architects
Firm's role on the project: Construction, Administration, and overseeing the project to make sure the principles were being implemented.
EBD Goal
The design team was tasked with designing a patient-centered emergency department that achieves improved throughput and increased patient, family and staff satisfaction.
Overview
The EBD champion involved in the design from the beginning has been an active member of the construction administration team providing oversight throughout construction to ensure EBD principles were implemented.
Challenge
Healthcare facilities across the country are facing tremendous challenges due to a multitude of factors, including increasing populations, growing demands from aging baby boomers, pressure to achieve high scores on performance measures through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and increasingly strained budgets. Cheyenne Regional Medical Center (CRMC) approached the design team at Davis Partnership Architects (DPA) with these concerns and a specific focus to resolve the challenge of crowding in their emergency department.
Solution
Early on in the design process, CRMC and DPA worked together to define the goals and objectives based on the challenges. The design team conducted a literature review from the existing evidence to create innovative concepts. During our EBD journey, we came across the study conducted at the University of Kentucky (UK) by Christmann, Zborowsky, Kelly, and Taylor. In this study, researchers examined the impact of the chair-centric model in the Fast Track area of the ED.
Based on this research, the design team worked closely with physicians and nurses to develop a results waiting area with a chair-centric design and a pod configuration that allows the emergency department to open and close pods depending on volumes. We believe the new design will increase throughput, thereby reducing issues of crowding in the ED. In addition, it is hypothesized that the new model will improve patient, family and staff satisfaction.
Davis Partnership’s research team is in the process of collecting and evaluating the baseline data in the current ED including patient and family satisfaction surveys, staff focus groups, staff job satisfaction surveys and archival data including time stamp data and Press Ganey ED Survey data. The new ED opened in August 2013, and a post occupancy evaluation (including the same measures used in baseline data collection) will be conducted in the summer of 2014.
The EBD champion involved in the design from the beginning has been an active member of the construction administration team providing oversight throughout construction to ensure EBD principles were implemented.
We expect that by incorporating the EBD process into the design, the goals of increased capacity, facilitating throughput while shortening length of stay, will be achieved giving Cheyenne Regional Medical Center a flexible space that can adapt to future models of care.
