Innovation

Our Philosophy

Driven by Data. Armed with Insights.

We innovate to improve design at all scales. We believe technology should make our work more open, more transparent, more accessible, and that these advantages lead to informed and confident decision-making.

Our time-tested DISCOVER, DESIGN, DELIVER approach allows opportunity for innovation at all points in the process. Below is a sample of these tools and approaches.

Discover

Understanding you, your needs, and how space can enable your goals.

Engagement

We believe an open, transparent process leads to greater project buy-in and more confident decision-making. Engagement - with leadership, users, patients, and other project stakeholders - is a key part of a transparent process. Making the results of that engagement crystal clear is critical.

In this example, we engaged with a group of clinicians to post-its and stickers to gather data on desired department adjacency. Using the data collected from a traditional adjacency matrix, we generated an interactive adjacency visualization. Hover over the departments to highlight desired adjacency. Click and drag the departments to reshuffle the visualization.

Inpatient Bed Demand Forecaster

Interactive Floor Plan

Patient Room Calculator

Patient and Exam room calculation is a predictable model with a variety of dynamic inputs. The main objective is to determine the daily "throughput" of the room...or in other words, how many exams can the room accommodate per day (including clean-up time). One you have the daily throughput, its easy to calculate how many visits can be accommodated per year for each room, and subsequently how many rooms will be needed to meet the projected patient volume. (Of course, the formula can get more complicated...for example, if operating hours vary by day, or if the exam length varies by provider or due to a clinical teaching component.)

(forecasted patient volume * exam length (minutes) / clinic operation time (minutes per year))

x

target efficiency factor %

x

projected growth %

=

# of exam rooms needed

To streamline our analytics efforts, and to make the connection between abstract concepts like efficiency and throughput more transparent, we have created a dynamic patient room calculator. You can adjust the sliders to see the trade-offs between efficiency, operating hours, and other factors. Try it out!

Design

The creative process for developing, refining, and assessing scenarios that meets your needs.

Scenario Modeling Toolkit

NBBJ has a deep bench of healthcare design expertise. We build on that knowledge through the use of custom developed apps and software. Our Scenario Modeling Toolkit (developed in house by our software designers) allows us to generate viable master plan concepts more quickly and efficiently. This, in turn, allows us to test a greater quantity of scenarios. In the video below, a simple line sketch is quickly transformed into an interesting building with well-proportioned patient rooms and a reasonable column grid. In addition, the tool is also evaluating the scenario against solar access benchmarks and zoning setbacks.

Llama Clinic Simulation Modeling

If your complex problem would be simplified through the development of a custom app or algorithm, we can do that. This tool simulates agent based processes like the flows of people in a hospital outpatient facility. It helps to better understand the facilities we design and allows us to compare and optimize different layout options. We developed this proprietary tool as a quick alternative (for clinical simulation) to Flex-Sim, which is our industry standard simulation modeling tool.

Based on a user defined patient schedule, the program models a day in the clinic whereby staff and space resources are utilized to support the patient schedule. Llama visualizes how people move around an outpatient facility during a day. While doing so it collects project specific data:

Time and distance traveled for staff and patients.
Time that patients spend waiting due to a doctor or a nurse walking to meet them.
Utilization of rooms to spot bottlenecks or underutilized resources.

See below for an example simulation, as well as a dashboard of quantifiable data outputs from the tool.

Musical Chairs Phasing Design

Developing the preferred future state scenario is one challenge. Figuring out how to get there is another. To streamline the task of designing the most efficient phasing strategies, we have developed a phasing design tool called "Musical Chairs." With this proprietary tool, we can design a strategy to reach the desired future state condition, as well as come up with strategies for the back-fill opportunities simultaneously. See below for an example animation from our Musical Chairs tool.

Deliver

Realizing your vision.

Typically, consulting work is delivered in the form of a report: a bound, printed book that can be several hundred pages and 100+ Mb in PDF format. These documents hard to share, and are never easily accessible when you really need them.

That's why we prefer to deliver your project in the form of an interactive, dedicated project website. This delivery method has many benefits:

Accessibility: your project is easy to access from any computer or mobile device. It is designed to be mobile friendly and searchable.
Security: your project is hosted on a secure platform, with multiple options for password protecting all - or specific parts - of the site.
Transparency: your project website is updated as the project progresses. This means users can keep up with development as it happens, offer feedback in online forums and message boards, and stay abreast of changes. This openness is an important way we build trust with your users.
Interaction: when your users can't make it to workshops and feedback sessions, they may feel out-of-the-loop. With a website, we can extend in-person events to online forums, surveys, galleries, and custom designed engagement activities. This extends the reach of the engagement process, resulting in a more robust project that socialized throughout the process.

We take advantage of every opportunity to make our processes nimble and more efficient, and our work easy to use and more accessible. An interactive web deliverable is an important part of this approach.

Below are examples of projects delivered with dedicated project websites. In each example, we have scrubbed all the client's identifying and proprietary information. (The 'BluePacific' client is a fictional client we use for marketing purposes only.)