Hospitals and medical office buildings must undergo a complete rethinking to move them functionally and architecturally from the 1970s to models that make sense for the 21st-century. Wanda Jones, healthcare futurist and president of the New Century Healthcare Institute, believes that we need to reinvent hospital design and construct linear-spine facilities that provide patients with more personalized medicine. This anticipates expansions, contractions, removal and replacement of patient towers by dividing the number of patient beds into two, three or four towers. This way, they can be incrementally changed without interrupting the others and are readily adaptable to specific programs.
In a recent interview for the Alter+Care Podcasts on Healthcare, Wanda Jones discusses the paradigm shift in terms of new technologies that will make obsolete the knowledge base on which healthcare systems, hospitals and physicians have made money up until now. Every surgical specialty will use robotics, and cures for cancer will be based on technology that has arisen out of the human genome project. The New Century Healthcare Institute is a research-and-development and educational foundation devoted to population-based planning and adaptation of the healthcare system to future conditions.
were overwhelmed. A similar scenario could occur on a national scale.
