Innovation Means Convergence for Healthcare Design
By: Angela Holcomb
I started my career in healthcare architecture but my intention was very different. In school, I was passionate about designing hospitality spaces because I felt I could push the boundary of design and offer innovative solutions that impact the end user experience. When I met my first boss, he convinced me to try healthcare architecture as a career, and I was intrigued because healthcare embodies all aspects of design from commercial to hospitality and medical. I have been fortunate to work on a variety of projects and have grown to love the challenge that healthcare architecture provides. It is a complex puzzle that has a different solution for each facility.
As a healthcare designer, the challenge is to always provide thought leadership and innovative thinking for my clients, who are all researching and testing different techniques to provide better service to their patients. Over my 18-year career, buzzwords like healing environments, evidence-based design and universal design have dominated the conversation, and yet the trends with the biggest impact increasingly involve consumer choice. Patients are demanding an elevated, premium medical experience at a reasonable cost, and one of the many reason’s I’m excited to be on board with tvsdesign is because the firm’s prudent approach to business helps clients achieve exactly this. More facilities are looking like hotels than hospitals and are offering more amenities in more locations to provide better access for patients. These hospitality and outpatient trends coming forward in healthcare are most evident in Florida, though hospital facilities in various locations are branching out to reach their patients within their community.
With healthcare’s consumer-centric shift, I see these settings becoming more amenity based, and have been able to put my passion for hospitality design at the center of my approach to healthcare design. I am thrilled to join the team at tvsdesign because of their reputation in high quality, multidisciplinary design, and am looking forward to connecting this exceptional design to my healthcare expertise. I believe healthcare facilities are looking for fresh solutions that the team at tvsdesign is uniquely qualified to lead the charge on. I am excited to be on this journey to transform the healthcare experience.
