Healthcare Design - May 2020 - 26

RESOURCES

REAL-TIME

RESPONSE
HEALTHCARE DESIGN will be

PERSPECTIVES

BUILDER OUTLOOK
IN LESS THAN seven days in March, Mike Wood, vice president of construction at Medxcel, a facilities management firm (Indianapolis), said his organization went from wondering if COVID-19 was
something the organization needed to address to setting up a 50-station command center to support its clients. During the webinar "Managing Your Healthcare Construction Project in the Midst of
COVID-19 Crisis," hosted on April 2 by the Association of Medical Facility Professionals, Wood and
other industry professionals shared what they've learned since the COVID-19 outbreak began, some
of their strategies to stay relevant, and what they expect the future holds.
Looking at the COVID-19 crisis from the contractor and supply chain perspective, Randy Keiser,
vice president and national healthcare director at Turner Construction (Nashville), said he's seeing a
shift in project types, with growing demand from clients for alternate care facilities, including adapting non-healthcare facilities or hospital conference rooms and teaching areas into care areas. "We're
working 24/7 to get jobs done early," he said.
Beyond what's happening today, panelist Michelle Mader, president of Catalyst, a healthcare consultancy and division of Haskell (Charlotte, N.C.), discussed some of the implications for the construction and design industries "once we get on the other side of this."
Looking at the short-term, she said she anticipates the industry will face growing problems with
raw materials and construction supplies, especially as manufacturers shutter their doors or reduce
manpower. She also predicts medical construction projects that have been funded but haven't broken
ground to be re-evaluated in the next six to eight weeks.
While long-term implications are "a little less clear," Mader said one of the biggest developments
she's seeing is increased regulations and policies around isolation and surge capacity at hospitals to
mitigate COVID-19, which will impact the built environment. With expectations that the disease may
have a resurgence in the fall or become a cyclical issue, much like influenza, she said policy makers
and code officials are looking to "get on this in a hurry."-Anne DiNardo, executive editor

rolling out webinars to keep
the industry up to speed
on what's happening with
the COVID-19 outbreak,
specifically the challenges
surfacing that are tied to
the built environment and
the solutions that industry
members are putting into
place. The first, "Response
Time: Healthcare Designers
Help Combat COVID-19,"
brings together industry
leaders Hank Adams, senior
vice president, global director
of healthcare, HDR; Jeffrey
C. Stouffer, executive vice
president, global director,
HKS; Jocelyn Stroupe, director of healthcare interiors,
CannonDesign; and Joshua
A. Theodore, vice president,
global health, Leo A Daly, in a
conversation moderated by
HCD Editor-in-Chief Jennifer
Kovacs Silvis. This and
ongoing webinars can
be accessed on-demand
at HCDmagazine.com.

Hank Adams

Jeffrey Stouffer

Jocelyn Stroupe

Joshua Theodore

Jennifer Kovacs Silvis

IDENTIFYING

TESTING SITES

SOLUTIONS

26

MAY 2020

IN ORDER TO minimize

exposure to COVID-19,
healthcare facilities need
to separate healthy and
suspected, uninfected
patients from confirmed,
infected patients.
Hospital networks with
multiple buildings in the
community can dedicate
the specific task of
diagnosing or treating
patients to separate
locations.
The ideal process
would leverage virtual
visits to evaluate symptoms, reducing the risk of
overburdening facilities
or contaminating others.

After a digital consult,
patients would be
referred to a drive-up
testing location or
an outpatient testing
facility.
Outpatient facilities can transform into
large-scale testing
centers by applying
the following design
concepts:
* Enhance patient
throughput with
one-directional flow
to prevent further
contamination, with
a dedicated entrance
and exit. For
urban environments,

dedicated elevators
can be utilized for
entering and exiting
patients.
* Utilize groups of
exam rooms with
architectural barriers
to prevent spreading
the infection.
* An on-stage/off-stage
layout with separate
corridors for clinical
staff and patients
provides additional
protection for staff.
* Non-clinical workplaces can be repurposed for quarantining large groups with
minimal symptoms.

HCDMAGAZINE.COM

* Mechanically, additional isolation or
negative pressure
rooms are beneficial
for infection control.
Ideally, all patient
spaces would be
enabled to become
negative pressure.
* Once a diagnosis
is received, patients
would either be sent
home to recover while
being quarantined or
to another facility for
additional care.
Ambulatory surgery
centers are an ideal
environment for treating patients with mild

symptoms. With patient
holding bays for prep/
recovery, multiple
patients can be treated
at once without concern
of infecting others as all
these patients will be assumed to be infected.
By directing all other
patients away from the
hospital, providers can
focus on the most severe
patients in the hospital,
as it is the best setting
for treating this patient
population.-Seth
Rothman, senior healthcare architect, E4H
Environments for Health
Architecture
http://www.HCDmagazine.com http://www.HCDMAGAZINE.COM
Healthcare Design - May 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Healthcare Design - May 2020
