设计重塑未来病房

    医疗业一向有些平淡无奇。政府管制、缺乏透明度的医保政策，还有护理病患的繁重工作构成了一个错综复杂的网络，时尚元素在里面基本没有多少容身之地。身在其中的工作人员也很少会有余暇退后一步，审视一下整个医疗体系，同时反思一下，如果有人能放慢节奏、认真思索一些具体问题，就能了解哪些做法是行之有效的，哪些无法奏效，以及哪些方面能有所改观。医疗业的这个特点决定了，这个行业里实际上没人有时间、有兴趣考虑设计的作用。

    据一些建筑师和设计师反映，在设计上缺乏思考正是医疗业之所以在众多方面难以达标的重要原因。毕竟设计不是光关乎形式，它还与功能休戚相关。萨莉•惠特曼说：“我们认为，设计拥有推动各个行业实现变革的潜力，正像它已在电子工业、汽车业和其他众多领域所表现的那样。但在医疗业，我们还没有系统地开发设计的潜能。”

    惠特曼是NXT Health的执行总监，这是一家致力于医疗业设计的非营利组织。用她的说法就是，这是一家医疗业长期以来一直付之阙如的研发工作室。它于2006年经美国国防部（Department of Defense）批准成立。当时国防部要求由这家机构主导，与其他机构合作设计未来的病房——不是充满未来感的手术室，也不是一套全新的治疗技术，而是能在个体层面上改善疗效的病房。这种病房本身及其设计原则几经改变，但基本目标始终如一：严格地通过更好的设计，而不是什么颠覆行业的技术突破或联邦法律的强制要求，来为病患创造更好的护理体验。

    现在，这种种努力的最终成果终于横空出世了。它名为“2020病房”（Patient Room 2020 ），这个月在位于纽约的杜邦可丽耐设计工作室（the DuPont Corian Design Studio）正式揭幕。从表面上看，现在的病房和未来的病房之间的差别可能主要体现在装修上。但NXT Health团队与其合作者——30多位来自各行业的合作伙伴，他们分别贡献了打造这个样板病房所需的技术、材料和技术诀窍——坚称，看待“2020病房”不应该只着眼于表面价值。对供病人和医护人员所用的各种技术进行简化和整合可能看似容易，重新设计过的卫生间也颇为美观，但这支团队表示，这些改变真正代表的是对病人所处的环境从整体上所做的重新思考。多年来，这个环境在很大程度上一直都一成不变。

    国际建筑公司斯堪斯卡公司（Skanska）是“2020病房”项目的合作者之一。安德鲁•奎克是该公司美国分公司的卓越医疗中心（Health Care Center of Excellence）资深副总裁。他说：“医疗业正处在发展的十字路口，从临床角度看，它正在经历一场颠覆性的变革。所以，现在当你开始关注医院的建筑环境时，就不能指望今后还像过去几十年一样用同样的方式、在同样的空间提供医疗服务。” 

    There's very little that's sexy about the health care industry. Within the tangled threads connecting government regulation, opaque insurance policies, and the actual work of patient care itself, there's not a lot of room for glitz or style, and certainly very little time for those working within the health care machine to step back, take inventory of the larger system, and reflect on what's working, what's not, and what could be better if only someone would stop and think through certain problems. This aspect of health care ensures that virtually nobody in the industry has the time or the inclination to dwell on the role of design.

    According to a small group of architects and designers, this lack of design-thinking is precisely why the health care industry struggles to deliver on so many levels. Design, after all, isn't just about form. It's about function. "We think that design has the power to revolutionize industries, just as it has in electronics, in cars, in everything else," Salley Whitman says. "But in health care we haven't tapped into that in a systematic way."

    Whitman is the Executive Director of NXT Health, a non-profit health care design organization that she describes as something like the research and development shop that the health care industry has always lacked. NXT Health got its start back in 2006 via a Department of Defense grant asking the organization to lead a design collaboration in producing the hospital room of the future -- not a futuristic operating theater or a suite of new treatment technologies, but a patient room that could improve health care outcomes at the individual level. The room itself and the design principles underpinning it have undergone some changes and alterations in the interim, but fundamentally the objective has remained the same: to create better patient care strictly through better design -- no game-changing technological breakthroughs or federal legislation required.

    The final product of that effort -- christened Patient Room 2020 -- was unveiled this month at the DuPont Corian Design Studio in New York City. On its face the differences between the patient room of the present and the patient room of the future might appear largely cosmetic. But the NXT Health team and its collaborators -- more than 30 industry partners kicked in technology, materials, and know-how to produce the prototype -- insist that Patient Room 2020 not be taken at, well, face value. The streamlining and packaging of disparate technologies for patient and caregiver use might seem like obvious solutions, the redesign of the bathroom a nice aesthetic touch. But what this really represents, the team says, is a wholesale rethinking of the patient environment, which has remained largely unchanged for decades.

    "The health care industry itself is really at a crossroads, it's really being turned upside down from a clinical perspective," says Andrew Quirk, senior vice president for the Health Care Center of Excellence at the U.S. outpost of global construction firm Skanska (SKBSY), a collaborator on the Patient Room 2020 project. "So when you turn to the built environment, you can't expect to deliver health care in the future the same way -- and in the same space -- as you did in the last few decades."