The Future Of Hospital Design – Inside The Point Of Care

Interminable waiting lines; long, boring corridors; piles of paperwork; these are processes and scenes we’re used to when turning to healthcare institutions. But they attest to the relics of a workflow from the 20th century; while 21st-century technology can radically improve the system from the inside out. Quite literally.

Indeed, in designing the future of hospitals, much will be offloaded to the outside of these institutions by leveraging digital health technologies. Patients could monitor their vitals wherever they are thanks to wearables and share the data to their physicians remotely. But that does not make hospitals obsolete altogether. Rather, they will become health centres for patients for preventing diseases, for acute care patients and for patients who need surgical procedures or large radiology machines.

While these are long term goals, several adjustments can be undertaken in the short term to build up to the ideal design of future hospitals. These could help better incorporate digital health tools to fight the pandemic, which could help those institutions become more resilient against future health crises.