"Designing for Health" is a monthly, web-exclusive series from healthcare interior  design leaders at Perkins+Will that focuses on the issues, trends, challenges, and research involved in crafting today's healing environments. This month's topic:

Research Informing Design: Ideas to Implementation

By Kalpana Kuttaiah

In the 1960s Perkins+Will created a design practice focused on healthcare. As this practice grew, so did the complexities of designing healthcare facilities. With more than 600 professionals in our healthcare practice in over 20 locations around the globe designing over six million sq.ft. of facilities annually, we sought to develop a more formal method for sharing new knowledge, while seeking efficiency in our internal communication of best practices, lessons learned, skills, research findings, benchmarking, design dialogue, ideas and expertise. What developed over the years is the Perkins+Will Healthcare Center of Excellence (COE).

The COE is an annual firm-wide conference that is held in rotation at each of the Perkins+Will offices. The success of the COE is in the continued participation from a wide array of people: in-house professionals consisting of healthcare planners, programmers, designers and healthcare practitioners on staff, clients, industry leaders, academics, research scientists, and facility users, fulfilling the mission of the COE to focus on research, innovation and critical thinking.

Each year the topics of investigation at the COE correlate with the needs of our clients' and the issues challenging the industry. At the last few COE's we have researched evidence-based design, inpatient unit design, and future healthcare scenarios. As the first firm to commit to the goals of the AIA 2030 Challenge—a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero in all new buildings by 2030—the 2008 COE focused on sustainable healthcare design, where we strategized how we would achieve this goal. We have raised the bar with each passing COE, and the outcomes from the last few COE's have been encapsulated into valuable tools and implementable frameworks that bear direct application to our work.

Our design for Silvermere Hospitals' flagship project Embassy Medical Center (EMC) in Sri Lanka, is a good example of how some of the ideas discussed at the COE are implemented. By elevating all critical support areas above the second floor level, the building and operational elements for power, housing, surgery, etc., will be protected and maintained to serve the population in case of a catastrophe. The hospital will be a self-sufficient entity whereby it will not only produce its own resources, but it also will take care of its own waste thereby relieving the burden from the local community while providing resources for them. Christy Marcelline, director of Silvermere Hospitals stated "EMC will create history by introducing possibly the first medical high-temperature anaerobic digester—a community energy resource—and open-air terraces of patient rooms."

Adopt-A-Room, a Perkins+Will project designed at the Fairview Hospital in Minneapolis, Minn., has an innovative design solution for a patient care model for children who experience extended hospital stays. Intensive research and direct input from patients and their families helped shape the design of these rooms, to be focused on four fundamental needs of the users; sense of control, comfort, connectivity with life outside the hospital, and family involvement. This is the feedback we received from one of the patients: "Our family wants to THANK YOU for the much improvement in the Peds unit at Fairview! I went through 2 bone marrow transplants during the years of '90-92 when the rooms and halls were cold and uninviting. Now diagnosed with a second leukemia in '07 I was privileged to get into one of the Adopt-a-Rooms. We love it and THANKS AGAIN!!"

"Participating in the dialogues ranging from evidence based thinking of future generations represented by the younger members, to the experienced based arguments made by the more 'mature' members, was fascinating!" says one of the participants at our Inpatient Unit COE, Dr. Jorge Guerra, professor of radiology, at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine, on being interviewed regarding his experience as an attendee at the conference. The design team for the University of Miami went on to apply some of the findings from this COE to its project. The design for the proposed 144-bed hospital (850,000 bgsf) included all single-handed patient rooms for acute care and critical care rooms. The decision was made to create universally sized acute care and critical care rooms for long-term flexibility within the bed tower. Every patient room would have monitoring capability. Also unique to this design was the placement of a counter with a built-in handrail to allow patients a hand-hold from the patient bed to the toilet door.

The COE initiative has helped us position our research and best practices, which in turn informs the design of the next generation of ideas. This learning cycle furthers innovation in our approach to design and contributes to the quality of healthcare delivery. Each year the results from this conference are shared through many venues: published as a comprehensive book, circulated through monthly research newsletters, and featured in publications such as Healthcare Design Magazine and Health Facilities Management, as well as Ideas+Buildings, the annual Perkins+Will publication. This knowledge sharing helps not just Perkins+Will, but our clients and the industry as well, as it influences our work, and equips us to be leaders in the healthcare design practice.

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Kalpana Kuttaiah, associate AIA, LEED AP, is an associate at Perkins+Will. She is the firm's healthcare research manager, and has a strong knowledge base that is rooted in innovation and sustainable discourse. She leads the firm's research efforts and focuses on tracking the performance of healthcare facilities that incorporate new innovative design elements on both operational efficiency and the delivery of patient care. She can be reached at kalpana.kuttaiah@perkinswill.com

The first installment of "Designing for Health," entitled "Shifting Culture, Shifting Service Lines: Is Tiger Woods the New "Grandmother"?" is available by clicking here.