Image courtesy of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
When the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania opened its 17-story, $1.6 billion Pavilion building last October, it marked the culmination of a several-year plan to create a patient-centered building built for the future of medicine. Looking at the facility design can provide journalists with a sense of where new hospital construction is headed and provide plenty of ideas for feature stories.
In the largest capital project in Philadelphia hospital’s history, designers called on features used by Disney to hide from public view core services like linen and trash chutes, and reserve the outside of the building and views of downtown for patients and families, said John Donohue, Penn Medicine’s vice president of entity services, during a March presentation at HIMSS22, the Health Information and Management Systems Society’s annual meeting.
They also included a new main telecommunications equipment center, 31,000 network ports, and almost 900 Wi-Fi access points, including some just outside the building where staff congregates during breaks in nice weather.
Each of the 504 patient rooms has a 75” monitor that integrates functions like television viewing and weather with information about the patient’s care plan and names and photos of care team members. Through an integrated pillow speaker, patients can use voice commands to call for a nurse; control the room’s lighting, window shades and temperature; turn on or off privacy glass on side of the room facing the hallway, and work the television or play music. Care providers wear badges that wirelessly transmit their photos and positions to the patient’s digital board. Rooms can be converted to serve as either intensive care unit beds or regular patient rooms as needs change. During the next phase of design, building engineers will incorporate clinical imaging so doctors can pull up patient scans on the monitors in patient rooms when discussing their care.
During the past two years and counting, hospital and health care staff have been overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic with droves of workers quitting their jobs as part of the Great Resignation. Could artificial intelligence (AI) play a role in helping fill some of the gaps? A recent flurry of stories suggests it could.
In January, nonprofit patient-safety organization ECRI released a report of the 