Photo credit: Spencer Brown
Kaiser Permanente is testing its future in a nondescript San Leandro office park.
Its Sidney R. Garfield Health Care Innovation Center, named after Kaiser's founding physician, opened last summer and functions as a laboratory for experimenting with new design elements, technologies and approaches.
A number of innovations to be included in the next generation of Kaiser medical centers in California have been tested there, including a new palette of colors such as "garden cucumber, deep creek, dried parsley and fresh grass," said Jennifer Ruzek, the center's director. She said the new colors are meant to "evoke a sense of well being, providing (an) inviting environment for health that appeals to the body, mind and spirit."
Some will be incorporated into new hospitals in Antioch and Modesto, and the full range of new colors will be rolled out in Kaiser's new Vacaville medical center, set to open by 2008, a year or two after the others. "It's sort of like a movie set," Ruzek said of the 37,000-square-foot facility, complete with moveable plywood partitions and cardboard mockups of exam-room furnishings. It shows "what a future hospital will look like."
Kaiser expects to spend $27 billion on hospital construction over the next decade, so efficiency counts on the bottom line.
Some hospitals create a single room to showcase and evaluate new designs, officials said; Kaiser mocked-up the equivalent of an entire medical-surgical ward so its architects, engineers, nurses, physicians, IT staffers and others can see and test various full-scale combinations of furnishings, art, equipment and signage. More than 4,000 employees have been trained or seen demonstrations at the center since it opened its doors last June.
Some elements to be included in upcoming medical centers -- such as Kaiser's 142-bed, roughly $500 million Antioch hospital, slated to open in early November -- were originally tested at the center; others were discovered while designing the Antioch and Modesto facilities and will be incorporated into other new sites. Examples include:
A new nursing unit design using a triangular format said to provide wider corridors and promote better work-flow.
A more efficient medication-room design that improved the positioning of drug dispensing and storage systems.
A combination of wireless technology and bedside training intended to make nursing shift changes more efficient.
Among other technologies, the center has evaluated robots that may help physicians interact with distant patients, mattress covers that can read vital signs automatically, and a standardized operating-room design so "you could blindfold a surgeon and drop her into any (Kaiser) O.R. and she'd know where everything is," Ruzek said.
"From a clinical perspective, we're trying to look into the future and test ideas in a place that's safe," said Paul Feigenbaum, M.D., Oakland-based regional medical director for hospital and continuing care operations at Kaiser's Permanente Medical Group. "It allows people to think outside the box about how medical care might be delivered differently."
The Garfield center cost $5 million to build and takes roughly $1 million a year to operate, said Kaiser spokesman Jim Caroompas. Kaiser hasn't calculated an annual return-on-investment for the project, he said, "but we're certain it saves us quite a bit of money, in terms of efficiencies across the board."
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San Francisco Business Times - May 7, 2007
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2007/05/07/story7.html