Friday Remix: Hospitals of the Future

Part of living with many craniofacial conditions is scheduling, having, and recovering from surgery. Hospitals are certainly not the most welcoming places, but can we change that?

NXT Health says we can!

Take a look at this article from Good Magazine (by Dave Ruthven) and NXT Health. I've pasted an excerpt from the article below:

The automotive, entertainment, food and beverage, and retail industries work tirelessly to craft user-centric experiences, so why does an industry with so much invested in it (17.9 percent of the U.S.’s total GDP), and so much advanced technology (see doctor robots) have so much trouble with customer relations?

The answer is complicated. In all fairness, healthcare providers are at somewhat of a disadvantage. None of the aforementioned industries have to cater to a user group that is simultaneously going through physical discomfort and life-altering emotional turmoil. Throw in managing family interpersonal relations, an ambiguous payment process, and a constantly changing regulatory landscape, and you have a recipe for disaster. To further complicate matters, your services are so vital to the community that you can never shut down to retool anything, so you must build on top of existing inadequacies with Band-Aid, quick fix solutions. Under this collective pressure, it is no surprise that healthcare has had trouble evolving to match the increasing demands of a more connected and informed 21st Century consumer.

The end result is Patient Room 2020, a design that is not afraid to take chances, but is also grounded in functionalism and tied to solving real world challenges facing modern healthcare organizations, such as infection control, patient/family engagement and optimizing caregiver efficacy. The prototype installation at the DuPont™ Corian® Design Studio in New York features many innovative concepts that were generated during the collaborative process, including a sink that illuminates to encourage staff handwashing, a technologically enhanced overbed table that gives patients a bedside control center, and a bathroom that has the ability to morph into numerous configurations based on user needs.

The article contains more information and photos of what the hospital experience of the future could look like. I for one certainly hope that hospitals do start upgrading and expanding their services to truly meet the needs of patients and the next time I have to have a procedure, I would happily test drive the Patient Room 2020!