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Designing for
Efficiency

Designing for
Patient Safety

Designing for Sustainability

Designing Healing Environments

Wilmot Sanz knows how to help hospitals operate more efficiently through smart, efficient design. We help hospital operators decrease costs and increase productivity in many ways:

Assessing Needs of Hospital Staff
A series of early meetings helps our design team to understand the needs of the hospital and staff. After careful consideration of various design alternatives, the team creates a care model for the project. By establishing a care model at the beginning of the process, our team is able to focus all subsequent efforts on efficiently achieving these objectives. Following the principles of lean design, unnecessary steps, representing wasted effort, are identified and eliminated.

Reducing Complexity
It is important to attain the goals of the client without allowing the process to become overly complex. Increased complexity and waste can lead to higher costs, delays, and errors in patient care. This can be combated through efforts to reduce inconsistencies and waste, or anything that uses time, space, effort, or money without need.

Eliminating Obstacles
As the lean design process unfolds, the team works to identify process patterns or physical design features that obstruct the delivery of efficient care. The goal of the team is to eliminate these obstacles and avoid the trap of "paving over cow paths."

Improving Flow
Flow is a crucial element of lean design. Services are expected to move efficiently to those who need them. Equipment failure and human error can both impede flow. Cross inspection by specialty staff is integrated into the design effort to challenge the user group conclusions on flow in the care model design. We advocate the introduction of smart technology into the healthcare environment to improve the flow of materials to staff and care to patients. Examples include patient and staff tracking systems, medication bar code scanners, automated medication distribution, and inventory control systems.

Optimizing Performance
Lean design promotes the notion that efficiency is achieved through simplicity. Thus relying on a large number of complex systems is undesirable. Rather, hospital staff should seek to optimize the performance of each part of the system. This can be accomplished in many ways. Nurses' efforts can be streamlined by de-centralizing charting stations and medication distribution, allowing nurses to devote more time to patients and less to traveling between destinations. Standardized room design eliminates the need for staff members to "find" supplies, light controls, and outlets in the treatment area.