Author: Eliz

UCLA Health (Los Angeles) has selected the project team to transform the former 175,000-square foot Olympia Medical Center in Los Angeles into a neuropsychiatric hospital.

Global design, architecture, engineering, and planning firm HOK (Los Angeles) and construction firm McCarthy Building Companies Inc. (Los Angeles) will serve as the design-build team for the project. The facility will provide services for adult, geriatric, child, adolescent, and intensive care patients.

UCLA Health’s inpatient neuropsychiatric program is currently housed in the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center on UCLA’s Westwood campus in Los Angeles. The facility’s 74 inpatient psychiatric beds will be relocated to the new hospital, which will include space for additional beds, bringing the facility’s total bed count to 119.

Plans also call for 20 observation beds, as well as imaging, a pharmacy, lab areas, and administrative offices.

Trauma-informed design features will include distributed therapy

I have been reflecting as 2022 winds down, realizing that as healthcare IT leaders prepare for a new year, there will be many headwinds facing our future path. Although it’s been almost three years since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, leading healthcare IT organizations has never been more challenging.

What worked for many years in terms of leading technology teams is often no longer enough in today’s new healthcare setting. The skills, traits and experience that made leaders successful in the past continues to change direction and evolve as the fallout from the great resignation and remote working impact the workforce.

I’d like to share, from my experience, several strategies that IT leaders may benefit to focus on as we move into 2023 and beyond to maximize retention and productivity.

Assuming that you have a healthy organizational culture, having your finger on the pulse of the environment and setting your sights

At the end of every Healthcare Design Conference + Expo, I have the same thought: “This was our best year ever.” The 2022 event in San Antonio was no exception, and I’m not alone in my sentiments. In the days following, I saw countless social media posts echoing the same response.

This year felt extra special for many reasons. Though we were able to gather together last year in Cleveland, we were fewer, and people were still being very cautious. There were more fist bumps than hugs, and many friends and colleagues I saw only from the eyes up.

From day one of this year’s conference, the energy was tangible. People were excited to be together to learn and celebrate our accomplishments as a community. And celebrate we did.

There was a packed house when A. Ray Pentecost III, director of The Center for Health Systems and Design, was

Friend Health wanted to establish a project that serves medically underserved areas within Chicago’s neighborhoods, particularly in the city’s South Side area.

The resulting Friend Family Health Center in the Woodlawn neighborhood is certified as a Federally Qualified Health Center that provides low-cost services to residents in need, regardless of insurance, financial status, or immigration status.

Designed by Moody Nolan (Columbus) and built by construction firm Powers and Sons (Chicago), the project spans two stories and displays a welcoming facade to the neighborhood. The building entrances are aligned with public transportation routes to encourage accessibility.

A mural on the exterior of the facility celebrates the history and diversity of the Woodlawn community, as well. Painted by local muralist Rahmaan Statik Barnes, the piece uses warmth, color, and connectedness to feature “living legends” from Woodlawn, including  Pemon Rami, Takalayah Barnes, Atiyah RunTings, Afrika Porter, Lesle Honore, Rahmaan Statik, and Masequa Myers.

As the temperatures finally dip here in the Midwest and we have our first dusting of snow on the ground, I can’t help but be grateful to stay inside and enjoy some quiet moments—for a couple of good reasons.

It was a dizzying late summer/early fall, as our Healthcare Design team produced both our HCD Forum event in September and then just three weeks later our Healthcare Design Conference + Expo in October. In between the two, my family and I moved to a new house. (I’d say thankfully it’s just one mile from our previous house, but we’ve come to realize moving is a nightmare regardless of distance.)

And as we’ve settled into our new place and work to make it our own—and are repeatedly exasperated by the laundry list of to-dos that come with loving a century-old home—I’m reminded of why we ended up here in the first

Sarah Prezek is a lead associate and project manager at Booz Allen Hamilton. This blog was coauthored with Vishal Thovarai, lead scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton, and Elaine Johanson, director of the health informatics staff under FDA’s Office of Data, Analytics, and Research, and program manager of precisionFDA.

Healthcare organizations understand the enormous potential of precision medicine. The current one-size-fits-all medical treatments deliver non-uniform results and often perform poorly for those who do not fit the “average patient” health profile.

By considering an individual’s specific health attributes, including genomic, environmental and lifestyle information, medical professionals can better tailor specific treatments that will deliver more successful outcomes.

What if, for example, doctors could better understand which COVID-19 vaccine would perform best on a particular patient based on their unique health profile, or gain insights into how to address the multitude of symptoms associated with long-term COVID?

Enter precision medicine. Advances

Breaking Through 2022 Finalist

Now in its third installment, Healthcare Design’s Breaking Through is a conceptual design competition that encourages industry members to forget the traditional rules and restrictions of healthcare design to answer the challenges anticipated for the future of healthcare delivery. Four finalists made it to the finale that took place at the 2022 HCD Conference + Expo in San Antonio and presented their concepts to the audience during a keynote session.

Concept: A.R.O.M.A.
Team: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Team representatives: Erica Parker, product designer; Christopher Brause, product designer; and Pulkit Jain, senior data engineer

The premise: Most healthcare data is collected via slow, expensive research projects that are reactive to long-existing health concerns, meaning communities might experience a huge toll before anything is learned or action taken.

A.R.O.M.A. (Ambient Robotic Olfactory Monitoring Apparatus) proposes a preventive health tool that leverages sensors and artificial intelligence

The principal at Champlin Architecture in Cincinnati talks about his parents’ influence on his career path, appreciation for teamwork in everything from project teams to TV shows, and new pandemic-inspired work habits.

What drew you to a career in healthcare design?

My father works in architectural design, so at a very early age I started developing a passion for architecture. At just three years old, I remember sitting next to my dad at his drafting table, drawing up houses for all of my family members. My mother was a nurse for many years, so I also grew up hearing and seeing a lot about the healthcare world. My siblings and I all followed our parents’ footsteps, with me in architecture and my two brothers in healthcare.

During my first healthcare project at Champlin Architecture in 2004, I knew right away it was a project type that I would enjoy focusing

Dr. Prashila Dullabh is vice president and senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago, and Director of NORC’s Health Implementation Science Center. She serves as the Principal Investigator of the Clinical Decision Support Innovation Collaborative Project.

She co-authored this article with Dean Sittig, NORC senior fellow and professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center and a co-investigator of the CDSiC Project; Dr. David Lobach, vice president of health informatics research at Elimu Informatics and a co-investigator of the CDSiC Project; James Swiger, health scientist administrator in the division of digital healthcare research in the Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; and Dr. Edwin Lomotan, chief of clinical informatics for the Division of Digital Healthcare Research in the Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement at AHRQ. 

Providing patient-centered, equitable and evidence-based health care is increasingly recognized