The Medical Equipment / Technology Forum is a platform for the interaction and conversation about leading edge technology among owners, architects, engineers, facility managers, contractors, equipment and technology planners and vendors.

This interactive discussion will explore the various aspects of executing a clinical lab project including the overview of core and specialty testing areas. The panel will highlight the drivers including major medical equipment, advanced automation and growing trends in molecular testing. The team will highlight the building occupancy code options and strategies for achieving a wide range of specifications for systems response including vibration, exhaust, water, UPS and emergency power.

The Health Care Owners Roundtable is a platform for health care administrators, operators, and design and construction leaders to openly exchange ideas with each other as well as engage with planning, design and construction professionals. Through a moderated discussion and active audience participation, this session will provide opportunities to better understand the pressing issues that are on the owners’ minds. It will create an environment for all participants to learn from each other and help us structure our design and construction industry to serve the needs of health care providers and owners.

Located in Albion, Nebraska — a town of 1,700 — Boone County Health Center is and has been a model of success for critical access facilities. Serving the area since 1950, the rural-health facility continues to evolve and better serve its community’s needs. This presentation shows the measured impact of a responsive solution that centers on flexibility. The facility chief marketing officer will present data that demonstrates how careful planning spurred the health center’s overall growth. This success story includes the design details influencing primary department growth, improved operational efficiency, and enhanced recruitment and retention — all while increasing patient volumes and health outcomes.

While the term “collaboration” is widely used, there’s buzz behind the buzzword. Effective collaboration among owners, architects and contractors is crucial to the successful planning, design and execution of a project. However, what does it mean to truly collaborate? And how does true collaboration lead to higher quality projects that benefit the owner? Challenged by a 48-month timeline to bring 850,000 square feet to life, as well as the pandemic, the team designing and construction Baptist Health Care’s new campus in Pensacola, Florida, thought beyond the typical design-build process and implemented innovative and creative collaboration strategies for success. The project opened on time in September 2023, largely thanks to enhanced collaboration which led to more than 25 early award packages and construction starting just six months after design began. During this presentation, representatives from the owner, program manager, designer and contractor will use this real life example to share the collaboration strategies and tools used to meet this aggressive schedule and provide a superior end product for the Pensacola community.

The government has passed unprecedented energy legislation these past two years ushering in the upcoming Climate Economy. During this session you will learn about those energy incentives in the built environment that apply to the Healthcare Industry. Those who are building new, renovating or improving, or designing Healthcare property are welcome to join and learn if they are eligible to participate in the Energy Incentive Program.

This presentation will discuss the road that has led to the development of a one-of-a-kind guideline. The purpose of Guideline 43 is to provide recommendations for the operation of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems that provide environmental control in health care facilities for the safety and comfort of health care facility occupants. The presentation will cover the genesis of the guideline, how the recommendations were developed and the current status of the guideline.

In this session, attendees will gain an understanding of one facility’s approach to addressing the pediatric behavioral and mental health crisis across multiple acuity levels of care. The speakers will discuss the challenges that children’s hospitals face to accommodate the surge of behavioral health patients in both the emergency department and inpatient settings within existing facilities. Presenters will highlight clinical, planning and design approaches to opening the first inpatient pediatric medical and behavioral health unit in Connecticut and how to integrate security and the latest technologies into the design of the physical environment for patient, staff and family safety and overall well-being. This session will help attendees gain a perspective of how best to respond to the changing needs of the pediatric behavioral health environment within existing facilities.

Design standards are often an undervalued and underutilized asset that owners, planners and design professionals can use to pre-empt a wide range of project challenges that often emerge during the planning, design and construction process. Hear from owners representing three of the world’s most preeminent health systems – Stanford, Kaiser and Medxcel – together with construction and engineering partners, (members of The Center for Health Design’s Built Environment Network), share how standards are developed and currently being used to anticipate supply chain needs, reduce maintenance and life cycle costs, and improve project delivery.

Standards are NOT going away. In fact, they are becoming increasingly more important in the planning, design and project delivery process for all types of spaces, furnishings and equipment, the building envelope, and to support different operational models. As they anticipate the future, they want to embed and integrate these standards into existing technology and use AI to gather data to better manage their portfolios. The evolution of and application of design standards has and will continue to change the future of the planning, design, and construction process. Don’t miss this opportunity to bring these real-world insights and best practices back to your project team.

Join this panel of experts for a discussion that explores questions, answers, and challenges in making informed decisions when selecting surface finish materials in healthcare environments.

Explore how to determine the suitability, testing required, and anticipated life cycle of materials; evaluate finishes prior to specification; and, obtain critical tools to inform your selection.

Gain insight into the demands of healthcare environments, including cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting paradigms and find the gaps in testing protocols. Consider the multiple perspectives of your entire project team – designer, facility manager, environmental services, clinical team, engineer, contractor, manufacturer, and architect – when specifying products.

Finally, discover root causes of materials failures in healthcare settings, how to minimize them, and apply those lessons learned to reduce failures in the future.

Mental and behavioral health care has been in transition for more than half a century. The evolution of health care facilities to support care for those living with mental illness has accelerated over the past 30 years and is continuing to do so. This presentation will explore the concepts and tenets that formed a new behavioral health care campus for the Sheppard Pratt Health System in Maryland. Many of the concepts are based on the original tenets of the organization from 175 years ago. The speakers will discuss the process of achieving the completion of the new campus, which included a complete change in the Sheppard Pratt Health System leadership and challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the administrator of the new hospital — who was not involved in the planning. but is now responsible for running the new hospital, including benchmarking the new facility against national benchmarks and the facility it replaced — will discuss insights on how the new campus was planned to provide care and how it is actually providing care today after two years of full operation. The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate how the facilities we create impact those receiving care in them. To this end, a family member of a patient of the new hospital will provide their thoughts on the new facility and how it has impacted their experience.