Dive Brief:
- When the University Medical Center of Princeton decided to build a new structure, it spent $523 million on a 636,000-square-foot hospital with rooms designed by world-class architects.
- The hospital surveyed patients and staff and spent months researching and creating a model room for the new facility. When the room was tested, patients in it rated food and nursing care higher and requested 30% less pain medication than patients in traditional rooms.
- The new rooms are all singles, have windows, extra visitor space, an in-room sink, a hand rail from the bed to the bathroom, lock boxes for medication storage and "same-handed" equipment for staff. The rooms aren't without challenges, though: Some of the materials, like expensive antibacterial floors, haven't been tested. And the emergency signal on the panel is close enough to other buttons that there have been 150 false alarms since the building opened.
Dive Insight:
Healthcare, an industry traditionally reluctant to look beyond its own experts for innovation, may be beginning a new trend. Using architectural insights to create more inviting and patient-friendly hospital rooms may actually improve patient care. Moreover, in a system that is increasingly relying on patient experience feedback to generate value, this may be an important financial move for the hospital. That said, as with everything else in healthcare, it is likely that the concepts and materials will need to be vetted and tested before newer hospital rooms are used more extensively. 150 false alarms is likely to be unnerving to patients and may negatively impact their experience.