Healthcare Facility Planning: Thinking Strategically

Spending millions of dollars to renovate, reconfigure, expand, or replace a facility can be intimidating without the right direction. Healthcare Facility Planning: Thinking Strategically, Second Edition, is a practical guide that will help healthcare executives move confidently from planning to implementation by deploying an integrated facility planning process, understanding the trends that affect space utilization and configuration, and planning flexible facilities. The book’s focus is on predesign planning—a stage of the healthcare facility planning, design, and construction process that is frequently overlooked as organizations eagerly jump from strategic planning into the more glamorous phase of design. Healthcare executives have the greatest opportunity to express a vision for their organization’s future during predesign planning, and decisions made during this stage have the greatest impact on long-term operational costs and future flexibility. Careful predesign planning allows an organization to rethink its current patient care delivery model, operational systems and processes, and use of technology to ensure a facility substantially benefits patients, caregivers, and payers. This new edition addresses current issues—new financial incentives, fluctuating utilization and demand, constant pressure for technology adoption and deployment, rising turf wars among specialists, intense focus on patient safety, and aging physical plants—that affect the way facilities are used, planned, financed, and built. Detailed examples, guidelines, and case studies, many new to this edition, lead the reader step-by-step through the facility planning process. This book’s planning process reveals how a new facility can improve operational efficiency, enhance customer satisfaction, and create new revenue streams, in addition to being aesthetically pleasing and well engineered. Highlights include: Deploying an integrated facility planning process tailored to an institution’s unique needs Understanding the trends that affect space allocation and configuration Defining strategic direction and future demand Coordinating operations improvement initiatives and planned technology investments with facility planning