In healthcare today, providing better care for patients increasingly means integrating complex technologies. As a healthcare leader planning a new or expanded facility, how can you construct and navigate a planning and decision-making process with such significant long-term implications? Start by asking the right questions.

To determine the required physical plant space for these innovative facilities, first define your current needs.

-       What would you like to gain or learn when using this type of equipment?
-       Do you want to introduce more than two modalities within a space?
-       How important will it be to plan for future upgrades?

Answers to these questions will have a significant impact on structural, mechanical, and ...[more]

Charles Osborne

The OR Theater of the Future: Innovative Planning and Design for Intraoperative Imaging

Shepley Bulfinch pioneered the first intraoperative MRI operating room at Children’s Hospital Boston. Here, Charles Osborne talks about the technological advance and its potential to transform the surgical suite.

by Deborah Johansen

Children’s Hospital Boston: From the Mock-up Room to Reality

As part of the design of the Berthiaume Family South building, Shepley created a full-scale mock-up of an operating room and an ICU as a design conceptualization tool. This article first appeared in the March 2003 issue of Healthcare Design.

Shepley healthcare principal Jennifer Aliber writes on the drivers of room planning in “The First Fifteen Feet: evaluating priorities where the corridor meets the patient room”, which appears in the June issue of Healthcare Design magazine.

Jennifer discusses strategies behind planning and prioritizing the potential components that can occupy the fifteen feet of space on the shared wall between patient room and corridor. This includes nurse servers, documentation stations, and building support.

Jennifer writes and presents widely on healthcare planning, including her “Real Numbers” series on healthcare space planning. She was a contributing author to “ICU ...[more]

The Meditation Room creates an island of repose, a compelling counterpoint to the powerful medicine practiced at the University of Michigan’s Cardiovascular Center. The design creates a piece of architecture and art that gives form to the desire of the Center’s in-house ministry for a space to nourish the human spirit that would be active, meditative, and non-denominational. Narrow niches in the limestone wall are backlit using fiber-optics to give the impression of filtered daylight. A writing desk nearby holds paper and pencil so that visitors can write down their thoughts, prayers, and notes ...[more]

Officials of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center cut the ribbon on a new Shepley Bulfinch-designed Outpatient Surgery Center (OSC) on June 17.

The ribbon cutting was part of a public open house for the OSC, which officially opened to patients on June 22. The open house included tours of the facility and demonstrations of operating room technologies.

“The OSC is designed to enhance the efficiency of current operations by performing many outpatient surgical procedures at a single, specialized facility, and reserving DHMC’s current surgical suites for more complex surgical procedures and emergency trauma cases,” said OSC Medical ...[more]