Healthcare designers can learn from office design

In her blog on the Healthcare Design website, Sara O. Marberry, the former executive vice president of The Center for Health Design, quips that she's seen the future of healthcare facility design and it’s an office

According to the blog, the increasing use of wireless technologies and computers by healthcare professionals to diagnose and treat patients requires that healthcare organizations create different types of spaces for people to communicate in person as in teams

In the 1980s, Michael Brill, an architect and researcher in Buffalo, N.Y., made the connection between office design and worker performance and job satisfaction.

His research and subsequent two-volume work, “Using Office Design to Increase Productivity,” published in 1985, was a game-changer for the office design industry, Marberry said. In 1991, Brill spoke at the now defunct Symposium on Healthcare Design.

Brill told attendees that office-like work is similar in every industry — information gathering, storage, retrieval, manipulation, and communication. That’s still true today, although electronic communication is and will continue to change how caregivers interact with patients, the blog said.

Going back and looking at the transcript of his talk published in the Journal of Healthcare Design, Marberry said she realized that much of his research is relevant to the types of workplaces needed in the ambulatory care centers of today and tomorrow.

Read the blog.