As the practice of medicine evolves, so are the healthcare facilities where physicians and other professionals deliver care to patients. Organizations are grappling with cost pressures and space is at a premium in all healthcare settings from ambulatory care facilities to large hospitals. Facilities leaders must explore new approaches to designing healthcare workspaces that enable teams to use space more efficiently and better meet the needs of all healthcare staff members.

“Pandemic-accelerated digital transformation and surging patient demand are pressuring an already constrained physician space market,” explains JLL's Susan Chang, SVP, Workplace Design Advisory. “Physician spaces need optimization more than ever.”

Chang emphasizes three key innovations to help healthcare organizations confront these challenges: healthcare ecosystem mapping, strategic space allocation and right-sizing physician spaces.

Traditionally, healthcare organizations have organized their physical spaces around individual disciplines. While this approach makes logical sense, it inadvertently reinforces silos that institutions are now working to overcome in pursuit of shared healthcare goals.

Space ecosystem mapping represents a new approach based on the idea that no space on a healthcare campus operates independently. Rather, they should naturally overlap to create a cohesive system that supports patients and healthcare team members.

Healthcare ecosystem mapping creates a high-level direction framework to visually identify the natural overlap between different space realms. This helps facilities leaders understand how public spaces, clinical spaces and workspaces interconnect as well as how to position spaces to encourage encounters that increase efficiency and improve experiences.

Combining individual departments’ workspace suites can create economies of scale and increase the amount of space dedicated to collaboration. By literally breaking down walls, facilities leaders can increase space utilization, reduce their overall workspace footprint and eliminate silos that contribute to spatial inefficiencies and inequitable employee experiences.

Following departmental hierarchy or historical precedent is often not the most efficient way to allocate workspaces in a healthcare setting. With many organizations experiencing space shortages in some areas and underutilization in others, facilities leaders are reimaging their operational infrastructure by adopting a more strategic approach to space allocation.

Rather than establishing department-based territories, forward-looking leaders are focusing on activities and outcomes. Prioritizing how spaces function instead of who “owns” the space can significantly boost efficiency and improve experiences for the whole team.

Technology plays an important role in strategic space allocation. Legacy desktops and phone landlines “anchor” physicians to fixed locations. Softphones, laptops and other mobile digital devices can enable more flexible, efficient workspaces.

Chang and her team deployed this approach successfully at a building within a health system in Eastern Canada. “We developed an approach for all healthcare staff to share one floor of the building, which houses all of the different types of spaces that any of them might need at any given time,” she says. “For example, there is a shared bank of private offices, but nobody owns any of them. They’re available to everyone to use as needed.”

The design also features a variety of meeting rooms for one-on-one, virtual or group meetings, with special focus on acoustics to maintain confidentiality. Open areas offer physicians and team members a place to work on tasks like responding to emails, whether they’re actively collaborating or not.

“Sometimes people just want to be around their colleagues, even if they’re not working together directly,” says Chang. “When they don’t need acoustic privacy, they can be out in the open.”

Making room for more flexible, innovative and efficient workspace design often means rethinking traditional spaces—particularly physician offices.

Chang reflects that in her 30 years of working in the healthcare field, she often encounters reluctance to alter physicians’ offices. But physicians are often allocated private offices that can go unused for six to 10 hours a day as they fulfill their essential clinical roles and other non-administrative work; that’s 30-50 hours a week when valuable real estate is sitting empty.

“Within health systems, physicians are very influential and are held in very high regard—and for good reason,” she observes. “But in many cases, space dedicated to them isn't being used efficiently, and we want to introduce new ways of working that can deliver real benefits.”

JLL has recently proposed a plan to implement a space-sharing culture for a healthcare client. The plan involves revising their space allocation policies to emphasize maintaining clean offices and securing confidential documents in locked storage. This approach is expected to facilitate flexible workspace sharing among physicians when implemented.

The shift away from paper medical records is a key driver of the transformation happening in physician workspaces. When physicians no longer need to print out and store physical files, they don’t need dedicated space in which to keep them. At the same time, offices can be powerful symbols of professional identity for physicians. As facilities adopt new ways of allocating space, they need to address any concerns or hesitations with care—as well as provide ample spaces with acoustic privacy where physicians can focus on confidential work.

As healthcare organizations face complex challenges, building social infrastructure where space is allocated efficiently is more important than ever. Adopting innovations like healthcare ecosystem mapping, strategic space allocation and right-sizing physician offices can help facilities leaders enhance collaboration, improve efficiency and drive greater strategic alignment among their teams.

To learn more about design trends and opportunities in the healthcare real estate space, visit https://www.jll.com/en-us/industries/healthcare.