By Bryan Daylor, Vice President of Ancillary and Support Services at Eden Medical Center

My name is Bryan Daylor, and I am Vice President of Ancillary and Support Services at Eden Medical Center. I’m also on the “user” team that has had significant input on the design of the new Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley. Those of us who head up different functional areas at Eden worked collaboratively with our respective teams (consisting of managers, supervisors, staff and physicians) to determine the best way to improve the delivery of patient care in the new hospital by implementing industry “Best Practices.”

Our focus is on patient safety and quality of care, efficient patient flow and effective use of skilled resources. This work was an important opportunity to design a building that supports the process of care and enhances the experience for patients and caregivers. We were challenged with the puzzle of creating work space and flow in a new building, but in the end we feel we have achieved an excellent design for the new hospital.

It’s noteworthy that the replacement hospital for Eden will serve as a prototype for “best practices” operating models to be deployed to other Sutter Health affiliates that are building new hospitals of similar size and scope.

In the beginning…

When our user teams initially convened, the project size and scope had already been defined. We were challenged to look at how we do things today, and then be creative in how we could design this building to improve they way we provide care in the future. Some of the key goals of these teams were to look at quality and safety of care, efficiency for providers and an enhanced experience for the patient. All of these concepts had to be balanced with ways to drive down the operational cost of the hospital—hence efficiency! We looked at things like distances traveled by providers, adjacency of departments and services that work together, etc.

Acting as stewards of already-scarce resources, we decided that the hospital building would be designed for predominately clinical and direct patient care services, while almost all administrative functions would be housed in the adjoining medical office building. Hospital space costs more than twice that of regular medical office space to build and operate. So, our goal was to maximize clinical areas within the hospital and minimize the administrative functions. With the convenience of the connecting medical office building, placing the administrative services there helped us meet our budget goals without compromising the project or the future operations of the organization.

We deployed twelve different teams representing the various functional areas of the hospital, each looking at their role along the patient continuum of care and planning the layout of the hospital to support the care process. The user group contributed a wealth of knowledge that was invaluable to the development of the design of functional spaces for patient care.

Staff from all functional areas, including nursing, interventional services (surgery), sterile processing, radiology and imaging, women’s health, emergency and trauma, cardio-diagnostic testing, therapeutics, pharmacy, laboratory, and support services such as plant operations, facilities, food service, housekeeping and shipping & receiving, worked on the design of their respective units and then determined which services fit together. Efficient processing, and patient flow and experience, were key factors considered in these collaborative design sessions. Physicians from the emergency department, surgery, medicine, obstetrics and radiology also participated in the design discussions to ensure the efficiency of their part of the care process.

We worked with architects from The Devenney Group on the rough design of these areas, examining the most effective alternatives for organizing these services with consideration of services that are complementary to one another. The teams worked through several iterations of plans, building on the previous ideas and concepts from team members. The architects revised these layouts several times in draft form before a final schematic design was reached. This collaborative approach brought together years of healthcare delivery experience, as well as years of hospital and operational design experience to result in an efficient and aesthetically pleasing design that met Sutter Health’s project and budget goals.

The management team and physicians are proud of the work they have done and are excited to be a part of building the health care services of the future. Please feel free to comment here, or email me if you have any questions about the internal layout of the new medical center.