Healthcare Design - September 2020 - 25

HCD 10

ARCHITECT

MARK GESINGER
Principal, ZGF Architects (Seattle)

WHO HE IS: Mark Gesinger, LEED AP, has been drawing structures and spaces
since he was a kid. But it wasn't until he was pursuing medicine in college that
volunteer work at a hospital found him intrigued by the space itself and how
teams worked within it. Fast-forward a few years, and his master's thesis for
architecture school was focused on healthcare design. Now, with more than
25 years of experience as a principal designer and medical planner at ZGF, he
works with some of the nation's leading healthcare institutions to enhance their
healing environments. According to his nomination, Gesinger is known for his
ability to engage stakeholders at all levels, with a knack for synthesizing and relating design elements and inviting feedback that will enrich the design.

ZGF ARCHITECTS

YEAR IN REVIEW: Gesinger's recent projects include major campus expansions
for Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Seattle Children's Hospital,
Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, and a new rural replacement hospital for Samaritan Health in Moses Lake, Wash. He's been instrumental in shaping not only the
facilities themselves but new models of care that spur long-term operational
change and enable growth. One example regarding the latter is his work on
Seattle Children's Building Care project-the second phase of a 1 million-squarefoot campus expansion. There, Gesinger helped develop a new model for surgery
inspired by care environments that he and the client researched and observed in
Europe. The proposed model, using induction rooms and external set-up rooms
to remove tasks from the ORs that limit throughput, is now expected to allow
Seattle Children's to see 40 percent more cases in the OR than current processes.
And that's just one outcome of the project's 18-month Lean process, driven by
Gesinger. Additionally, at Cincinnati Children's, he led the planning and design
of a new 609,100-square-foot addition and 136,100-square-foot renovation of
an existing critical care building, leveraging virtual reality models to present design options and gain critical buy-in from surgeons and frontline staff. The Lean
process there, which included 13 integrated design events and hundreds of stakeholders, resulted in a novel shape for the bed units (two bowties side by side) that
minimizes travel distances and establish a clear front and back of house.
INDUSTRY IMPACT: Constantly drawn to healthcare research, Gesinger often
shares new concepts to clients for consideration and visits new facilities to see
breakthrough designs firsthand. For example, he recently toured two Scandinavian projects to better understand how they infuse daylight into surgery suites,
with some of his findings now being incorporated into current work. He's also
skilled at communicating the benefit of exploring new solutions. Take the Seattle Children's Building Care project, where he utilized a computational data
visualization model to gain buy-in from key stakeholders, such as surgeons, by
visually demonstrating the increased efficiency that could be achieved by implementing a new model, even while reducing the overall number of rooms. He's
hoping to give back to the research community, as well, by working to establish
Building Care as a case study to inform future projects, with the goal to have its
solutions tested and documented in a post-occupancy evaluation.

Seattle Children's Building Care

Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center

SEPTEMBER 2020

2525

Healthcare Design - September 2020

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