Published 2011

Seventy-six Awards Distributed in The Best of NeoCon® 2011 Competition
Chicago—Seventy-six awards were distributed in The Best of NeoCon® 2011 competition of contract furnishing products during NeoCon® at The Merchandise Mart. Six Innovation Awards and a Best of Competition Award were included among the honors in June. The Tables: Training & Work Category took the top prize as the Best of Competition with MOTUS, manufactured by HALCON. 

Kaiser Permanente Opens New Medical Center on Capitol Hill
ROCKVILLE, Md. — Kaiser Permanente, a not-for-profit health plan and care provider, has opened the doors to its medical facility, bringing health care innovation directly to the front door of Capitol Hill. The Kaiser Permanente Capitol Hill Medical Center offers members state-of-the-art health care and maximum convenience.

Fewer Americans Receiving Health Insurance
WASHINGTON, D.C.—The percentage of Americans who report getting health insurance from their employer has been steadily decreasing over the past three years, dropping to a low of 44.6% in February, according to Gallup, Inc. Over the same time period, the percentage of Americans covered by government healthcare -- Medicare, Medicaid, or military/veterans' benefits -- has been increasing and now includes slightly more than one in four American adults.

McCarthy Completes Patient Tower for St. John’s Mercy Children’s Hospital
McCarthy has completed construction of a seven-level, 379,000-square-foot patient tower at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center in Creve Coeur, Missouri. The tower is the new location for Mercy Children’s Hospital. McCarthy led preconstruction services, served as construction manager and self-performed several aspects of the 44-month project, including concrete, steel and carpentry work.

Hospitals Need a Sustainability Manager, say 70% of Healthcare Professionals
Regional differences in how healthcare professionals perceive progress on sustainability and bottlenecks on cost related issues stood out in a recently completed survey conducted by the International Facility Management Association (IFMA) Healthcare Council and Corporate Realty, Design & Management Institute (CRDMI). The survey was conducted as part of a seminar series on “Energy, Economics & Environment: Making the 3Es Work Together in Healthcare.”  The seminar series traveled to 10 U.S. cities throughout 2010.  

Walls are Moving in Healthcare
by Beth Leibson -- When Burnaby Hospital wanted to build maximum flexibility into its newly renovated 7,000-sq.-ft. outpatient arthroplasty clinic, it turned to a mobile wall solution. The clinic represents a new model for the community-based hospital, in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. The new model will provide pre-surgical educational counseling and post-surgical physical therapy to patients with hip and knee replacements

Case Study - FM:Systems: The North Metropolitan Health Service, Perth
Tracks Leasing and Facility Details with FM Interact
Serving a population of more than 820,000 people in Perth, Western Australia, The North Metropolitan Area Health Service (NMAHS) consists of five facilities with a staff of more than 10,000. The Health Service is using FM:Systems’ FM:Interact to track leasing and facility details.

Case Study - ABB Drives at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center
demonstrate to the ABB team how their work helps save lives
If you have ever wanted to appreciate why quality and fast order fulfillment are crucial to healthcare facilities managers and all end users, you would have enjoyed being part of the visit ABB personnel working in the New Berlin factory made to the Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee in 2009. ABB staff Gene Brittain, Paul Jacob, Houxeng Xiong, Alan Pelishek, and Seng Yang volunteered for the visit to St. Luke’s, to see how drives leaving the factory reach their final destinations.

Published 2010

Research in Action by the Jersey Shore
Jersey Shore University Medical Center’s $300 million expansion and renovation project developed more than just the size and shape of the facility. It improved access, added sustainability components, and incorporated the latest thinking in evidence-based design into the project.

Care at the Castle
by Beth Leibson - The easy part of planning and building the $150 million, 124,000 sq.ft. expansion at Miller Children’s Hospital in Long Beach, California was meeting the staff’s tangible and technological needs. The hospital needed dedicated operating rooms, an imaging center, expanded neonatal intensive care units, and additional beds.

A Philadelphia Home for Research in Pediatrics
Launched with an initial gift of $25 million from Ruth M. and Tristram C. Colket, Jr., The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Ruth and Tristram Colket, Jr. Translational Research Building will house cutting-edge research programs in pediatric diseases.

A New Model for Military Medical Construction Decisions
by John A. Becker and Clayton A. Boenecke - In recent years, the quality and condition of military medical facilities have been subject to intense scrutiny. Our Secretary of Defense has said that our service members “deserve the very best facilities and care to recuperate from their injuries . . .and apart from the war itself, the department has no higher priority."

What are the Best Practices in Capital Spend Management?
by Allen Archer - With a continuous influx of patients and with aging facilities and infrastructure, healthcare facilities are experiencing continued “wear and tear”. As soon as one system is fixed, another needs to be replaced and so on.

Delnor Community will achieve Planetree designation
Delnor Community Hospital in Geneva, Ill., recently completed the largest expansion in its history: a three-story, 100,000-square foot addition. Following research into best practices in hospital design and patient-centered care, KDI Design, Inc., Geneva, Illinois, and the hospital staff chose furniture from KI to help create a welcoming, nurturing environment throughout the facility.

Facility designer finds comfortable—and proportional—seating
by Eileen McMorrow. While the population of Central New York State is shrinking in number, there is a need to accommodate those who are growing in size as patients and visitors to the University Hospital and the new Upstate Golisano Children’s Hospital in Syracuse, New York.

Hospitals hit hard by recession
WASHINGTON, D.C.-Six out of ten hospitals nationally are seeing a greater proportion of patients without insurance coming through their emergency departments, according to a survey from the American Hospital Association (AHA).

Lowest Growth in Healthcare Spending in 2007 since 1998
BALTIMORE-Healthcare spending in the United States grew 6.1% in 2007, to $2.2 trillion or $7,421 per person.  This was the slowest rate of growth since 1998 and 0.6 of a percentage point lower than the growth of 6.7% in 2006, according to a report by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Health care spending, however, continues to outpace overall economic growth, which grew by 4.8% in 2007.

Hospital Role Increases as Economic Stresses Mount
CHICAGO-With the nation's economic troubles, fewer patients are seeking hospital care while at the same time a growing proportion of patients need help paying for care, according to new report from the American Hospital Association (AHA). The report also noted that hospitals, which employ 5 million people nationwide, could be facing uncertain times as their financial health falters and ability to borrow funds for improving facilities and updating technology is squeezed.

Published 2009

Madigan Army Medical Center Eliminates Momentary Power Interruptions
The challenge for Madigan Army Medical Center was to conduct mandated emergency power system tests without getting “nasty phone calls” from medical personnel because of power interruptions. As a solution, the hospital converted open transition transfer switches that protected critical loads to closed transition, which connects with one power source before breaking with another.

Cleaning Product Standard Defines the Leaders
Washington, D.C.—Green Seal, a 3rd-party certifier of green products and services, has revised and re-launched its standard that takes environmental stewardship and the protection of human health to a new level due to increased concerns about the impact of chemicals on health, particularly our children’s health, and the environment. Green Seal first published its standard for institutional cleaning products—GS-37—in October 2000.

Green Seal Partnership Addresses Facilities Maintenance
WASHINGTON, D.C.—The introduction of Green Seal’s GS-42 Environmental Standard for Cleaning Services in 2006 ushered in a new era of understanding; laying out the requirements necessary for cleaning service providers (CSPs) to become Green Seal certified; CSPs attaining GS-42 certification are the vanguard of their profession, and demonstrate a greater understanding of the concept of “green” facilities maintenance operations.

Building Forensics Can Prevent and Solve Water Damage
by Wayne Offerman - Ongoing maintenance and repairs help prolong the overall health of a building’s exterior skin or envelop. But its fate is often predicated on what facilities managers aren’t typically trained to see or predict—until it’s too late.

Technology’s Impact Revolutionizes Hospital Design
by Beth Leibson - The latest trends in healthcare design read just like a word-processing manual: Add new and ever-changing technology; delete multi-patient rooms; and search for “institutional feel” and replace with “hospitality.” When you’re done, of course, change the font color to green. If only hospitals were as capable of acrobatics as the latest laptop.

Evidence-Based Design: Why the Controversy?
by Patty Looker - Recent articles and blogs from leaders in healthcare architecture continue to keep alive the controversies around evidence-based design (EBD). A key observation is that EBD is still an incomplete discipline. Further, we are seeing some professionals promote their purported competency in EBD as a marketing tool (gasp!) and that research findings are being quoted as definitive when they remain untested.

Healthcare with a Chinese Accent
Traditionally, Chinese hospitals consisted of narrow buildings with low floor-to-floor heights that relied on natural ventilation. The advantages were cultural: there were plenty of courtyards and a predominance of south-facing patient rooms.

Published 2008

Hospitals Help in Healing, Says Report
Hospital buildings can play a role in healing according to the first comprehensive report to look at the impact of the physical environment on child patients in health care settings.

Balancing Comfort and Function
At 64 years old, Good Samaritan Hospital, in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, was due for a facelift. But cosmetic updates and new equipment weren’t enough to satisfy the hospital’s goals to create a naturally rejuvenating environment with all the amenities of a state-of-the-art healthcare facility.

The Green Patient Room: A 3-D Experience in Every Context
by Glenn Fischer - The Green Patient Room is a 400-square-foot exhibit of sustainable concepts that can be applied to patient rooms. The Green Patient Room is the creation of the International Facility Management Association’s Healthcare Council, Healthcare Building Ideas, design firm Anshen+Allen and the Corporate Realty, Design & Management Institute. Skanska USA is also involved in this project.

Greener Purchasing Leads to Sustainable Hospitals
by Bill Gregory - Healthcare and hospital facility administrators are learning that developing and running a green facility does not cost more than traditional healthcare buildings. In fact, conservation of energy and water alone may save a typical hospital between $100,000 and $200,000 annually in operating expenses. This type of green benefit—whether realized as a cost or resource saving—is spurring the rise of sustainable buildings.

Modernizing Emergency Power
Modernizing a hospital’s emergency power system doesn’t have to be a big pill to swallow, according to Allen Meadors, electrical engineer with CTA Architects Engineers in Great Falls, Montana. The work can be completed in small doses, without unpleasant budgetary side effects. That’s exactly the prescription that Benefis Healthcare in Great Falls, Montana, is following for its East Campus.

In Case of Emergency: Plan to Keep the Hospital Functional
by Beth Leibson - Hospitals historically have focused almost exclusively on patient care. But since the 9-11 wake-up call, more and more facilities have begun preparing for emergencies ranging from natural disasters to pandemics to criminal or terrorist attacks.