Cultural Shifts Transforming Healthcare Design: An Introduction

Healthcare delivery and design is changing. To see evidence and the power of this change, all you need to do is look at the increasing number of headlines related to healthcare in the media. It is not only healthcare trade journals and design magazines publishing issues and articles that start with “The Future of Healthcare…” As one quick example, in Fast Company’s series on future predictions impacting our culture and society, Futurist Forum, no fewer than seventeen articles have been written to date on healthcare related topics. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (The State of Aging & Health in America 2013), the American Hospital Association (When I’m 64: How Boomers Will Change Health Care, 2009), the Health Research Institute at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the Pew Research Center, to name a few national research institutes, have published reports in the last five years that highlight varying trends impacting how healthcare delivery is responding to everything from changing technology to the needs of our quickly aging population.

At PAYETTE we are fascinated by research, innovation and change in the healthcare industry that transforms the way we think about and design healthcare environments. Whether it includes new developments in healthcare delivery technologies, how changing demographics will significantly increase and change the demands facing our healthcare systems, how healthcare institutions actually use their spaces or how we think about integrating flexibility into our designs, we are continually looking for and thinking about ideas that could have significant transformative impacts on how we design the healthcare spaces of the future. 

We also recognize the importance of reviewing past trends and we seek to understand their important milestones of design innovation. To this end, we are fortunate to have a long history of research, begun by Markus and Nocka in the late 1940’s, to which we can turn. Comparing the current flurry of change to previous benchmarks gives us a broader understanding of the healthcare industry and richer collective memory from which to design.

We are excited about the innovations and challenges that face the future of healthcare. Over the next several months, we will share posts from many members of the healthcare design team that highlight previous and current transformative trends in our culture, technology and environment that we feel will have, or have had, a significant impact on healthcare delivery and design. Our greatest hope is that through our research and reflections, we might inform the design of more thoughtful healing environments that actively consider the changing healthcare landscape.