Food for Thought Leadership: 10 trends in healthcare content to read and share

If you are attending the 2024 Healthcare Facilities Symposium—or any other healthcare conference on the horizon—gain some insight into topics sure to be discussed formally or informally by perusing IMEG’s curated collection of our recent healthcare-related blogs, executive guides, and podcasts.

1. “The Importance of Healthcare Resiliency: Preparing Your Hospital for a Crisis.” This executive guide provides a high-level look at how setting up a disaster-resilient healthcare institution is becoming an exceedingly complex problem. Considerations such as natural disasters, security, mass casualty events and infectious outbreaks, and cyberattacks are discussed.
2. “Central Sterile Modernization: A Guide to On- vs. Off-site Facilities.” Central Sterilization Services is a critical department for any healthcare system. This white paper discusses the pros and cons of renovating, relocation onsite, relocation offsite, and third-party management of these facilities.
3. “Enhancing the Quadruple Aim through Data-Driven Decisions.” This executive guide—also available as a breakout series of blogs—provides a high-level examination of the many ways that data-driven design decisions can help a healthcare organization by ensuring that their built environment supports the four guiding principles of the Quadruple Aim.
4. “Key Design Considerations for Designing the Smart Patient Room.” This blog post by IMEG HIT Project Executive Corey Gaarde examines the first and crucial step in creating a smart patient room: defining the vision for the experience.
5. “Decarbonization in Healthcare: A Practical Approach to the Built Environment.” This executive guide and related podcast provide guidance to healthcare organizations as they begin their decarbonization conversation. It explains the carbon problem and presents thoughtful, measured, and practical approaches that can ease the burden of carbon mitigation and eventual elimination.
6. “Acuity Adaptability and the Future of Healthcare.” This podcast and related executive guide examine the strategy, feasibility, benefits, and concerns of the acuity adaptable healthcare model in which patients stay in one room regardless of level of care.
7. “Offsite Construction Offers Benefits in Efficiency, Predictability, and Waste Reduction.” This blog and related feature article examine the factory-built construction industry, now being used in a variety of building types, including hospitals and other medical buildings.
8. “Microgrids for Healthcare Facilities: ‘Island Mode’ Ensures Long-term Operability.” This executive guide and related podcast provide a brief examination of the components, benefits, limitations, and challenges of microgrids, as well as tips for beginning the discussion on the feasibility of the technology for your facility.
9. “De-escalation by Design: Making Behavioral Health, ER/ED Facilities Safer.” This blog explains a security concept that adapts tenets of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) to the indoor behavioral healthcare environment and hospital emergency departments to create safe, calm, and therapeutic spaces and allow patients and staff dignity, respect, and agency.
10. “UW Health bringing a proton center powered by the sun to Madison.” This podcast and related blog preview University of Wisconsin Health’s Eastpark Medical Center and its UW Health | Carbone Cancer Center, which will be one of the few in the country to offer proton therapy, and in collaboration with Leo Cancer Care, the first healthcare facility in the nation to offer upright proton therapy.