The room's layout is novel too. The space is divided into three zones: family, patient, and clinical staff. The entire window area is given over to the family and other visitors, with extended seating transformable into a bed. The patient zone includes the bed, the toilet, and the media wall. The staff zone has a dedicated sink separate from the patient's bathroom, a computer screen for electronic records, and a medicine supply cabinet refillable from the hall, allowing for accurate, timely deliveries and minimizing patient exposure to microbes.
Privacy predominates
For all the architectural innovation, the most significant change is the shift to private rooms, which will both improve care and save money. Per-bed construction costs are higher for all private hospitals, but occupancy rates are higher too - potentially 90% to 95% at an all-private hospital versus 75% or so for a double-room facility. As numerous studies show, sharing a hospital room significantly increases the chance of acquiring a life-threatening infection. The infection rate for those in private rooms is far lower.
In all, according to research by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, amenities such as larger single-patient rooms, bigger windows, cleaner air systems, and decentralized nurse stations add $30 million to the $350 million price tag of a typical 300-bed hospital. But the changes yielded annual savings of about $10 million, giving a payback of only three years. "It costs less to operate a private-room hospital," says Dr. George Tingwals, of Stanford University Medical Center, "so everyone is doing it." In fact, almost no one in the United States is building two-bed rooms now, and in some states, health codes require that all rooms be private.
Modern medicine has produced an astounding cornucopia of technology: medical devices, pharmaceuticals, imaging equipment, surgical tools. The hospital itself will now be part of that arsenal.
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