设计重塑未来病房

    惠特曼说：“我不相信，如果还按老套方法，同时以更低成本来建病房能解决再入院和医源性感染等问题。这就是现在医保支付改革（payment reform）要解决的一些大问题，因为大家是为结果买单的。今后，只有病人不再因住院而病倒，不再因住院而病得更重，因为他们了解自己的治疗，所以一旦出院就不必再入院，医院才能让病人掏钱。而这些都是联邦政府正在跟踪考核的绩效指标。所以，这不是什么通过采纳新技术让电子病历变得更漂亮这么简单。”

    实际上这是事关医疗业价值主张的问题。“2020病房”所用的技术和材料并不比现在的一些可替代品便宜多少，但长期来看它们会让病人得到更好的护理，还能改善医院的经营状况。奎克表示，对多数医院来说，近期要把病房都改造成“2020病房”成本上吃不消。但随着时间推移，成本将会下降，同时采用这些技术所获得的投资回报将会更快地获得体现。

    惠特曼还表示，“2020病房”的理念不是让各家医院在自己院内照搬这个样板房，而是要启发大家在思维模式上有所改变，让医疗行业认真考虑设计所具有的普遍价值。这个样板房提供了一种实用模型，它可让医院管理者和建筑师直接借鉴或启发思考。但更要紧的是，它提供了一个清晰的范例，证明即使是在医疗业这样一个缺乏设计感的行业里，优秀的设计也是何等意义深远。

    惠特曼说：“今后医院的数量将减少，所以修建这些医院时我们最好修得好一些。我们必须采用工程技术含量极高的方式来建造它们，让它们成为治疗过程的一部分，而不再仅仅是一个附属物。”（财富中文网）

    译者：清远 

    "I do not believe that building things the same way but at lower cost is going to help with things like readmission, with hospital-acquired infections," Whitman says. "These are some of the big issues we're dealing with payment reform, because you're paying for performance. Hospitals are going to get paid because their patients don't fall, because they don't get sicker while they're there, because they understand their care so when they leave they don't come back -- these are all performance metrics the federal government is tracking. So this is not just about putting in technology so we can have fancier electronic medical records."

    Rather it's about a value proposition for the industry. The kinds of technologies and materials integrated into Patient Room 2020 certainly aren't less expensive than the contemporary alternatives. But long-term they'll improve both patient outcomes and bottom lines. In the near term, converting patient rooms to something like Patient Room 2020 will likely remain somewhat cost-prohibitive for many hospitals, Quirk says, but over time costs will decline and ROI for these technologies will come more quickly.

    And besides, Whitman says, the idea behind Patient Room 2020 isn't for hospitals to graft this model directly onto their hospitals, but to inspire a paradigm shift in the way the health care industry thinks about the role of design in general. The prototype provides a practical model from which administrators and architects can directly borrow or simply draw inspiration. But more than that it provides a clear example of how meaningful good design can be, even in an industry as unsexy as health care.

    "In the future there are going to be fewer hospitals, so when we build those hospitals we better build them right," Whitman says. "We need to build them in a highly engineered, highly technological way so that they are actually part of the care process, not just an appendage."