Tomorrow's hospital rooms will also be fully wired to help patients engage with the outside world and their own treatment. At the Kaiserslautern Military Community Medical Center in Germany, which will serve soldiers returning from the Middle East, the entire wall opposite the bed will have an interactive video screen, letting patients look at photos of their kids, stream Netflix, Skype with their friends, see schedules for doctors' visits, and hold video chats with teams of physicians.
Do no harm
Other recent research has looked at how hospitals contribute to patient harm. A landmark 1999 study by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that medical errors, including falls and medication mistakes, were responsible for up to 98,000 deaths in American hospitals each year, making preventable hospital errors the fifth-leading cause of death, behind only maladies like heart disease and cancer. Hospital believe better design can reverse the trend.
When architecture firm HOK began creating the University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro, in New Jersey, a replacement hospital building that opened this past May, fall prevention was a top priority. Nurses wanted clear sight lines into the room so they could see if someone was struggling to get out of bed, but the toilet presented a design problem. The safest place for the toilet is along the wall by the bed. But putting it there would obstruct the nurse's view of the patient's head. The solution to the sight-line problem: the parallelogram. By canting the room at angles like a diamond on a playing card, the toilet can still go near the patient, but recessed so that the nurse can see the patient from head to toe. The arrangement also lets the patient see both the window and the video screen.
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