This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

Leverage their human centered design services to enhance both clinical and business outcomes. Ready to take your healthcare system to the next level? Visit thisweekhealth. com slash pixelhealth today and discover the power of Pixel Health's tailored advisory services.

Today on Town Hall

(INTRO) experience is really the great equalizer in healthcare facility planning. By focusing on the desired experiences that we want, we can align our perspectives and create a shared vision.

My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health.

Where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare, one connection at a time. Our town hall show is designed to bring insights from practitioners and leaders. on the front lines of healthcare. .

Welcome to this episode of TownHall. We're diving into the future of healthcare facility planning and technology integration with Jill McCormick, who's a principal at Pixel Health. Pixel Health is a strategic advisory firm helping healthcare organizations design human-centered technology

driven environments that are enhancing both patient and clinician experiences. Jill specializes in facility planning, patient journey mapping, and digital infrastructure strategy using the sprint process to tackle complex healthcare challenges. Today we're gonna talk about how health systems can better integrate technology into facility design to improve efficiency, care, delivery, and the overall experience.

Yeah. And so as I was thinking about this, I'm thinking about experience is really the great equalizer in healthcare facility planning. By focusing on the desired experiences that we want, we can align our perspectives and create a shared vision. So this is incredibly important for facilities planning because the experience components actually need to be decided years before the building even opens.

And so without having a clear vision for the future state experience that you're trying to enable with a built space, with a technology. Then it becomes challenging to really understand or imagine the future or budget for future tech. And as we work towards the space actually opening, we might not have the optimal workflows and just end up repeating the past instead of taking an innovative and future proof approach.

When you have to rehab an existing space, what are some of the protocols that work that allow you to still achieve. The desired end goal.

and so they were not as future proof as you can imagine . And so when you think about how do you retrofit something to fit a new experience, there's a lot of work that goes into reimagining the space, working with the walls you already have, working with the cabling that you already have.

And usually that experience actually starts at home or before they even get there and nailing the intake and arrival process, for example. A lot of times in human-centered design, what we do is we look for areas of the patient journey that matter the most to the patient. Like, where is the most problem, where is there cognitive burden, what are the moments that matter the most and really starting to think how are we gonna nail those moments to create that sort of continuous experience within the environment.

If you stick with a clinical perspective or a technology perspective,

it's almost like that elephant story of the blind men and the elephant. If everybody's touching a different part of the elephant and describing the problem. That what experience does is it gets everybody on the same page and then you say what are the set of interventions to the building, to the technology, to the operational workflow that need to change in order to create or unlock that experience that you need?

And so from there you start to say, okay. I know what the experience is. I know what's gonna have to change operationally, what needs to happen to the building, what needs to happen to the technology?

That human-centered design principle to meet the patient needs, the clinician needs, and to have the best possible outcome, that to an extent is future-proofed. What does that actually look like in practice?

Yeah,

that's a

great question. So yes, we do a sprint process that is the Google Ventures sprint process for being able to rapidly make decision making or rapidly make decisions, include all of the right stakeholders in the decision making, and also really push you into thinking differently, thinking innovatively in the process.

And so the way that we do this work isn't exactly how Google Ventures does the work. We do research ahead of time. So we will meet with key stakeholders that are going to be in, let's just say the future built space. So meet with the stakeholders who will be in the future build and just get a sense for what their challenges are or what do they imagine for this space?

And what this allows us to do is to get all the stakeholders on the same page for what the highest level current state is. , we take this all into a facilitated workshop where and we did this one most recently in two days where we. Put the patient at the center of the change process. So we said, what journey are we gonna try to solve for? What's the most important journey for this built space

that we decided based on what the strategic reasons were and what the problems that needed to be solved was the planned patient visit. So a patient knows they're coming to the hospital. Hospital and they are going to have a procedure, they're probably gonna visit multiple departments or multiple areas of the hospital when they're there for their visit.

So you select the right people to come into the room. And so then. Together you use a process where you translate all of the challenges in the current state into opportunities. What if or how might we actually enhance the arrival process? What's going on in the arrival process today? What would it look like in a future state to be able to do that?

And so you have to bring. Solutions and inspiration to that art of the possible and the art of the future into those conversations. And then you literally, you just co-design the future state experience. People are sketching and drawing and they thought they could never draw or never sketch, and they're telling a story.

About what does this experience look like and what happens when I get dropped off and how do I navigate the hospital and what happens when I get to my room?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's really a matter of understanding what their risk tolerance is and what their own environment is that they're working in, and what the relationships are within the leadership of the organization to be in alignment about what they're going to do next. Forget facilities for a second, but any project that you're working on that has these new technologies involved in it, you have to ask yourself, what is the strategic reason for doing this? And in that strategic reason for doing this, you should have an understanding of like at what cost compared to what other areas that you want to enhance and.

Of the floor itself, it's the digital enablement of being able to use all of, like that AI isn't in the walls. Those are just sensors. That's the easy part, right? How are you going to build an organization that can try these new technologies that has a, a. Pathway for strategic learning and evaluation that can judge the results of any of these tests of change in order to be able to receive those benefits.

And what's the infrastructure underneath it? I always talk about connectivity as a core component, in a future state vision that I was working on with some clients. And they were really imagining a very connected. Workflow for I hate to use the word workflow, A patient journey where the journey starts at home.

All of that you're talking about is a very seamless journey and experience that requires infrastructure beyond just whatever's going into the walls, navigating that and being really serious about what the investments are and understanding that in order to deliver an experience at that level requires significant. Considerations and budget around all of that,

and you're likely still gonna have a little bit of resistance to change in that equation.

I think again, it's using the experience as the great equalizer.

It's saying, Is this the experience that we want to deliver? And then. Getting agreement on that with the stakeholders that have been selected because they know where the bodies are buried and because their department is the one that's gonna be occupying the space. And because they know what advanced care needs to happen in those procedure rooms, et cetera, getting their buy-in as the first, piece to this.

And so by following this process that they co-designed the future state agreement and they were selected for this process. The ones that did the co-design based on their ability to be the change agents for this process. And then of course, testing it with the front lines and with patients as well to say, is this journey what we want?

And you mentioned

this can be expensive. These are not short-term engagements.

These are not insignificant changes that are occurring in an organization. How are you measuring the success of a facility's design? And so let's also see the technology integration. What are some of the key metrics or even the feedback you're looking for post-implementation to help understand. How much of the pre-planning was successful and how much tweaking or modifying the initial workflows and the patient experience looks like after it goes live?

It depends on what it is that you're trying to implement. What is the core reason or strategic reason that you're trying to do this?

So depending on what the goal is of the space, is how you construct the measurement. But if I'm thinking just purely on experience, if I could only pick one measurement factor or one KPI or one measurement. Is the customer effort score, how easy or hard did you make each step of this journey for me?

How easy did you make it for me to, be a patient X, Y, and Z? Yeah, typically when you're going to the hospital, it's for a procedure of some sort. Sometimes you're going for a mammo or another test that's pretty routine. The same time you don't know what the outcome of that test is going to be until you get your results.

So I'm glad that is a guiding principle for you and for the organizations that you serve. So I have to ask you this last question. This is all about the future of where some of this is headed. If you had to predict the biggest shift in healthcare facility planning over the next five years, what would it be and how should systems be preparing for it?

If you're building a new building, then you don't necessarily wanna pave old cow paths or create a environment that's not future proof. But if you use your existing workflows, your existing point of view and bring it into that process, then you're just going to be keeping the work in the workflow and not necessarily improving or innovating on top of it.

And then how are you going to deliver that in the various different areas of the enterprise. And so I think that's gonna be a challenge in top of mind. And I hope that it doesn't hold people back from leapfrog technologies or leapfrog opportunity because they're thinking about the whole system at the same time.

So I think threading the needle on that is going to be an interesting area of focus of how do I create the most future proof. New in all of my new investments should be as future proof as

[Mic bleed]

If I was interviewing for a CIO job today, I would wanna go on a facility tour to really understand what I'm inheriting and also what my capabilities are for going towards some of the newer technologies and opportunities.

Because to your point, I've worked at buildings where. Hey, you're over an aquifer. Hey, IT is in a basement. Hey, it's next to rooms with leaded walls, and it's next to places where it's subterranean two or three stories down. Like it's hard to do some of these activities when you have partners like Pixel Health.

We appreciate you and your time today. Thank you so much. I appreciated it.

Thanks for listening to this week's Town Hall. A big thanks to our hosts and content creators. We really couldn't do it without them. We hope that you're going to share this podcast with a peer or a friend. It's a great chance to discuss and even establish a mentoring relationship along the way.

One way you can support the show is to subscribe and leave us a rating. That would be really appreciated.

Thanks for listening. That's all for now..