Instructor
Angela Mazzi
Hospitals and clinics are designed to treat illness - but where are the spaces that promote health? Healthcare facilities prioritize clinical spaces while spaces that support and enhance patient care get viewed as nice to have.
These spaces are the first ones to get cut when scope reductions happen to meet budget or to get repurposed if they do make it into the final design. In this course you’ll learn more about how they can act as your deliver of care partner and deliver real value. Clinical spaces like exam rooms, diagnostic and testing suites, surgery centers inpatient rooms, are often the only ones considered in KPI analysis. However, as reimbursements shift to value based care, there is real cost in ignoring the complete care journey. These “missing” spaces are the ones that will revolutionize care delivery and help you get better outcomes and engagement from patients while supporting the work of staff.
This course challenges you to rethink the environments where care happens. Instead of designing for efficiency alone, explore how to supplement care offerings and create spaces that prevent burnout, reduce stress, and foster genuine well-being for both patients and providers. You’ll see how targeted spaces for amenities, clinical support, and wraparound services can be embedded into facilities in ways that demonstrably improve outcomes. From family resource centers and ancillary services to staff respite areas and flexible community spaces, these design elements are not “extras” - they’re integral to delivering whole-person care.
You don’t have unlimited resources, so you need a better strategy that uses them wisely. This starts with how you think about the spaces to include. We’ll dive into functional and tabular programming strategies that go beyond the clinical checklist. Functional programs are powerful tools in revolutionizing how you think about care delivery. They describe the reason a space is important and how it should be used. This is something most organizations perfunctorily complete at the start of a project in order to comply with regulatory requirements. I’ll provide a template that lets you leverage the functional program as part of your operation strategy so it will be a document you lean on to guide design decisions and change management instead of filing away.
Tabular programs- the list of spaces, their areas, and quantity is something most health systems have worked with. However, there can be an overemphasis on grossing factors and cost per square foot that overlooks the ROI of the spaces provided. This approach locks you into budget and space constraints before you even get design going. Learn how the functional program can act as your translator to developing a higher performing tabular program. Finally, we will talk about utilization rates. This is an often-misunderstood number that is calculated inconsistently in the industry. Therefore, it’s easy to oversize a facility. Sharpening the pencil on utilization can allow some of the “missing” spaces we discuss in this presentation to be accommodated without increasing overall area.
Thinking about the ROI of whole-person care is more important than ever. Healthcare organizations are under relentless pressure - shrinking reimbursements, rising construction costs, staff burnout, and patient dissatisfaction. In this climate, it’s tempting to make decisions that look smart on paper: cut amenities, standardize spaces, and focus only on operational efficiency.
However, there can be unintended consequences to some of these decisions. What seems like a short term savings may cost you more than you realize. When facilities ignore the human side of health, patients feel like numbers, staff morale craters, and community trust erodes. The fallout? Poor outcomes, higher turnover, and increased costs that dwarf the money you thought you saved. Can you really afford that?
The path forward isn’t in cutting deeper - it’s in building smarter. Learn from a seasoned healthcare architect about steps you can take to right size departments, when to centralize or decentralize, and how to look at space utilization. Spaces that promote connection, recovery, and resilience don’t just feel good; they improve outcomes, attract and retain staff, and build loyalty that keeps your organization thriving. It’s time to shift your mindset from delivering care to cultivating health. Because the cost of not doing so isn’t just financial - it’s your people, your reputation, and your future.