Healthcare Design - September 2024 - 27

Researcher
LESA LORUSSO
PhD, RID, NCIDQ, Principal, senior vice president,
research and insights, Gresham Smith (Orlando, Fla.)
A
RMED WITH DEGREES in interior design,
architecture, business, and
healthcare design, Lesa Lorusso
serves as a firmwide resource at
Gresham Smith, using her diverse
background to strengthen healthcare planning
and design through research and innovation.
She collaborates with the fi rm's healthcare team
to facilitate human-centered design, development
and implementation of research strategy,
and scalable tools for knowledge-sharing
among planners and designers. Lorusso's key
roles include identifying opportunities for evidence-based
design research, leading strategic
implementation of research projects, and developing
external collaborative partnerships.
Her research efforts help arm and legitimize
the design recommendations of her colleagues.
Specifically, she collaborated with the Veterans
Health Administration and the University of
Florida, with Gresham Smith as the principal
investigator, on the study " Sensory Environments
for Behavioral Health in Dementia: Diffusion
of an Environmental Innovation at the
Veterans Health Administration, " investigating
the impact of multisensory environments as
behavioral therapy for veterans with dementia.
Awarded the Environmental Design Research
Association's Certifi cate of Research Excellence
for this work, she expanded upon the research by
disseminating it nationally with organizations
Research study at Veterans Health Administration
such as the VA, American Institute of Architects,
and Alzheimer's Association to bring the findings
directly to the clinicians and design teams
shaping environments of care.
She's also studying the impact of architectural
design on the sensory experience to reduce
patient and caregiver stress for clients
including Baptist Healthcare Pensacola, which
incorporated therapeutic multisensory environments
for pediatric, adult, and geriatric
patients. This work has infl uenced designs not
only for behavioral health but also intensive
care units, respite environments for clinic staff ,
and operating rooms.
Furthermore, she and her team continue to
push the boundaries of using technology to
study hospital environments to benefi t quality
of care as well as staff experience. This includes
multidisciplinary collaborations with acoustic
experts to model and test design impact on
sound reverberation in operating rooms, using
leading-edge wearable technology to track staff
movement and stress levels and utilizing artifi -
cial intelligence-integrated machine learning
for predictive modeling.
Colleagues rely on her to help build successful
client relationships, noting that when Lorusso
is a part of a project pursuit interview
team, the win rate is twice the average of the
firm's market win rate. Internally, her leadership
has also impacted the design process at
the firm and helped designers see design challenges
in a new light. Specifi cally, Lorusso and
the firm's research and insights team evaluate
evidence-based design decisions using a collaborative
framework and a mixed-methods
approach to pre- and post-occupancy evaluations.
In her six years with the firm, she's also
disseminated her work in more than 50 healthcare-based
publications, bringing meaningful
evidence-based findings and expertise to colleagues
and the industry at large.
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LESA LORUSSO (RESEARCH STUDY); LEROY SKALSTAD (HEADSHOT); JE48 - STOCK.ADOBE.COM (HEADER ARTWORK)
http://STOCK.ADOBE.COM
Healthcare Design - September 2024

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