The Innova Group

Innova @ HFSE 2019

 

 

 

 

 

Several Innova team members attended the Health Facilities Symposium and Expo (HFSE) in September at the Boston Hynes Convention Center. The symposium brought together national leaders in healthcare operations, planning, engineering and design to share insights and research, update attendees on health facility trends and perspectives, as well as foster discussion and collaboration to evoke change and the advancement of a better delivery of healthcare through the physical space.

Speakers of diverse backgrounds (architects, planners, clinicians, administrators) offered evocative accounts of challenges overcome through collaboration, redesign, and process optimization.

Highlights include:

  • Wendy Weitzner of the Innova Group co-led a session with John Muir Health’s Michael Monaldo to share a case study incorporating a breadth of stakeholders’ perspectives into large integrated system ambulatory master plan.
  • Reliant Medical Group, with Lavallee Brensinger Architects, shared valuable lessons from their experience implementing the design and construction of the delivery system plan developed by Reliant with The Innova Group. They shared the value of setting standards early in the project and shared insightful data on the costs and benefits renovation versus new builds.
  • Another one of our clients, Stanford Children’s Health, spoke about the lessons learned when building an impressive expansion in an active hospital and the all of the methods (and meticulous madness) that goes into ensuring that the youngest and most vulnerable of patients get the care they need and deserve during construction.

Other Innova team members in attendance included James Maxwell, Cheryl Howe, and Damiana Andonova, who received a scholarship to attend this year’s conference. Spotted in the crowd were also a few familiar faces—several clients and a couple of Innova alums—who eagerly said hello!

Happy hours and plenty of mingling abound, and several key take-aways from this year’s symposium come to mind:

  • Many means to the same end: healthcare organizations are frequently resulting in similar design solutions, but arriving at the solutions through different paths and processes
  • Not always cheaper to renovate than to build new: according to one case study, renovating costs were only 20% less than the cost to build from the ground up—and renovation was more expensive than new building in one example
  • Form follows function follows form: the future of the built healthcare environment has everything to do with how we plan to deliver care, and how well we deliver the future of healthcare is interminably dependent on the execution of how well we design and build for that vision

By Damiana Andonova | September 2019