Designing for Health: Rethinking Workplace in Healthcare
To improve the bottom line, healthcare systems have made incremental changes to slow the historical escalation in healthcare costs. They have implemented lean/six sigma changes, improved patient safety, and developed better measures and matrix for patient outcomes. A different approach to patient care and communication has also enhanced results. Team-based, interdisciplinary problem solving is becoming much more prevalent in patient care.
Source: www.contractdesign.com
Stegmeier Consulting’s Insight…
The issues facing the medical field has healthcare providers scrambling to balance costs without impacting the quality of care they can provide. As this article describes, an increase in patients, an aging population, and rising costs has an already overloaded system pushed up against the wall.
To push back, providers have begun exploring different ways in which their administrative employees work to ensure efficiency. One such opportunity for improvement lies in the design or layout of space. Opening up an office layout, they’ve found, can serve two primary purposes. The first, is to cluster employee seating to reduce the amount of square footage per worker. This, of course, reduces the need for larger floor plates which provides a real estate savings. In leftover spaces, focus rooms can be built-in to ensure adequate levels of collaboration and privacy are possible, as well.
The second reason behind implementing an open work environment is to establish a collaborative, team approach to healthcare. Working together, administrative staff, nurses, and even doctors can generate ideas and potentially solve problems faster than had everyone been working in isolation. Again, the goals are better care, and lower costs–an office redesign in this mold can accomplish that.
Stegmeier Consulting Group has been fully aware of this shift in medical field space utilization for some time now. Founder Diane Stegmeier recently partook in a panel discussion at the BOMA (Building Owners and Managers Association) Conference in Cleveland, Ohio addressing this very topic. If your organization (healthcare related or not) is hesitant to implement such a drastic change to the work environment for fear of employee resistance, contact SCG. We can help your team develop a workplace and workforce strategy to overcome your current business challenges, and then prepare your employees for working in new ways.
Stegmeier Consulting Group can assist with a wide range of challenges involved in implementing a workplace change initiative. Contact us to find out how our services can help your organization.
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