In 2011, several healthcare and design professionals penned an essay for The Hastings Center, a nonpartisan research group focused on bioethics and public policy issues.
Together, the authors — which included architects, academics and a former children's hospital CEO — made "the business case for building better healthcare facilities." It came in the form of an updated "Fable Hospital," which is a hypothetical facility that incorporates the best design practices to improve patient care and reduce overall costs.
"Fable Hospital 2.0" included several evidence-based design elements and features aimed at improving the patient/employee experience, as well as their potential costs. For example, large, single-patient rooms would cost an additional $13.5 million for a 300-bed hospital, and a staff gym would cost $500,000.
While the combined costs of the new innovations would total about $29.2 million upfront, the authors found hospitals could recoup those savings in about three years. Reduced patient falls, fewer healthcare-associated infections, less nurse turnover and other benefits would lead to more than $10 million in annual savings, according to their research.
Ellen Taylor, director of research at The Center for Health Design, wrote in Healthcare Design magazine that building these types of facilities in today's healthcare environment has given "even more resonance" to the business case as capital dollars are at a premium. Finding the right information and data to validate new-age healthcare design, and being transparent throughout the process, can lead to the most success.
"There isn't a single prescriptive approach to the task of the business case [of sustainable healthcare design], but there are many options to explore that range from aggregating a basic set of generic data and calculating a simple payback up to estimating the long-term impact of societal burden as it relates to design," Ms. Taylor wrote.
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