Every healthcare facility struggles to compete in the ever-changing delivery of care environment. It is now time that high performance healthcare facilities contribute to your success. Having healthcare facilities from the 1970s and earlier competing and trying to deliver efficient and productive services is like trying to win the Kentucky Derby while riding a mule. What you need is a racehorse.

How your architects plan, design and implement new and renovated facilities will determine whether you are working with a mule or Derby contender.

TEG Architects uses a facility planning and design strategy, TEG’s Efficient Design+Productive Care, to produce facilities of all sizes that assist in the delivery of exceptional care while promoting staff efficiency and productivity. This process is founded upon exceptional interaction and collaboration between design teams, clinicians, physicians, technicians and every level of provider in today’s medical centers.

We recently completed our fifth volume in TEG’s Efficient Design+Productive Care series titled, “The Return On Investment of Facility Design.” This volume focuses on a case study of Our Lady of Lourdes Regional Medical Center in Lafayette, Louisiana. While TEG has used this strategy for many years, we were able to design this 186-bed acute care replacement facility, located on the 46-acre greenfield site, using our full array of innovative principles.

The facility design decisions and the collaborative process of clinical reengineering demonstrates improvement in patient outcomes, patient satisfaction, financial performance and work environment quality.

Clinical Procedural Platform

A key element is the Clinical Procedural Platform, founded upon efficiency of square footage, staff and patient movement, convenience for patients, families and as well as flexible utilization of patient areas depending upon time of day and peak clinical volumes.

Many departments, which were marginally profitable, are now realizing financial results that are netting exceptional profits. These financials were not at the cost of patient outcomes or patient satisfaction. In fact, satisfaction has risen from the 60^th percentile to the 86^th percentile in the latest Press Ganey report for Our Lady of Lourdes (OLOL).

TEG conducted a comparative analysis of OLOL’s performance in the years of 2011 and 2014. Services were provided in 2011 for the full year in their old facility. 2014 represents the first full year of service at the new campus. Such comparisons offer clinical and administrative staffs an opportunity for direct comparisons of financial performance.

Financial Results

The emergency department alone showed an exceptional turnaround with an 89 percent increase in Total Gross Revenues and a 71 percent increase in Net Revenue, while staffing expenses actually decreased by eight percent. In 2011, OLOL showed a Loss in Net Profit of $71,912. In 2014, the Net Profit reached an astounding $2,088,402.

Across the entire spectrum of clinical departments, OLOL has seen significant improvement in Net Revenues, Profit Margins and Patient Satisfaction, all while most departments have been able to reduce staffing due to square footage efficiencies, location of support services near points of care, visualization of patient care areas and utilizing cohabitated spaces by multiple departments – reducing debt service and increasing staff efficiencies.

Decision Process = Results

OLOL provided TEG with an opportunity to implement our entire array of planning and design strategies that deliver efficiency and productivity at all levels. Every healthcare facility is different in many ways, but they are also very similar in just as many ways. The results at Our Lady of Lourdes can be replicated and improved for any community-based healthcare provider. We continue to refine the process, strategies and design innovations.

Wayne Estopinal, AIA, ACHA, LEED AP is president of TEG Architects.