Optimizing a medical office design becomes easier when you consider modern healthcare workflows and trends regarding the patient experience.
There are many ways to improve an office space with better design and high-quality renovations. However, when the project addresses a more specific setting, such as healthcare construction, there arises the opportunity to make changes to reflect evolving industry standards. Optimizing a medical office design becomes easier when you consider modern healthcare workflows and trends regarding the patient experience. Here are just a few points to consider.
Work Patient Flow Into Floor Plan
Whether you’re redesigning the existing space or expanding the facility, the newly organized floor plan of your medical office design should cater to patient flow. This makes it more efficient for patients to navigate their visit, as well as creates defined areas for different healthcare staff to meet the patients throughout the different phases of their visit. Many medical offices have a cyclical layout. The patient enters the clinical and consultation areas through one end of the waiting room and works their way around and back to the other side of the reception area.
Changing Physician Spaces
The typical doctor-patient relationship has taken on a more consultative nature. More time is spent at each appointment to hold discussions about patient health rather than just clinical examinations. As a result, the medical office design usually contains larger exam rooms. Family members accompany the patient to appointments, so the larger rooms are necessary to accommodate the visitors plus the physician. This is especially key for practices that see pediatric patients since parents must accompany kids to their appointments.
In addition, physicians rely more and more on electronic health records. Instead of a dedicated office for each doctor, many doctors share one office as a working space. When they meet with patients, they can pull up the necessary information on a portable device, or more likely, from an in-room computer. Paper patient records and filing cabinets are becoming less common in today’s medical office design.
Consider Patient Privacy Needs
The patient experience starts at the medical office reception. When patients are registering or checking-in, privacy is as great of concern there as it is in the consultation rooms. There are two ways to go about addressing this. One method is to create a separate patient registration area in the medical office design. This area is dedicated to giving receptionists personal information, completing medical history forms, handling of insurance cards and payments, and other activities of that nature.
Another method is to lean into the “going paperless” and technological trend by installing patient check-in and billing kiosks. Some of these tasks are straightforward enough for patients to follow guided check-in instructions. This frees up staff from needing to oversee these processes directly. Many of these patient-service kiosks, like ATMs, have a built-in privacy filter.
Work With Encore Construction
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