DIGITAL INNOVATION
Encouraging the adoption of digital innovation
Gavin Thompson, Partner and former CEO of UK-headquartered global engineering consultancy, Buro Happold, explains how the business is ‘transforming how healthcare estates collaborate by encouraging adoption of digital innovation’.
In today’s world, it is almost impossible to go anywhere without relying on technology. Whether you are socialising with friends, buying a new car, or doing your weekly grocery shopping, more and more people are opting to do it online. Turning to websites and apps to help us with our day-to-day chores, tasks, and managing relationships is quicker and more convenient, and this has completely changed the way that we live and work. This has been made even more apparent over the past two years of navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not just in our personal lives, of
course, that software is having such a transformative effect; in the built environment and the healthcare design and construction sector, it’s transforming how buildings work too. We’re now able to create buildings that more actively help deliver care, and support staff through improved data capture, automation, AI, and ‘smart’ products. In the UK, NHSX has been established to drive this digitisation in public sector healthcare to re-think how people receive care and treatment. Utilising this technology isn’t, however, just limited to engineering and the products used in buildings. There is also an exciting opportunity to improve how healthcare professionals and the myriad of consultants involved in the sector collect, share, and update, the critical information used to plan, design, and build modern facilities.
Difficult to navigate We’re used to the ‘norm’ of traversing organised volumes of files to bring together the strategies, masterplans, and guidelines that planners, architects, and designers need in order to create new facilities for a client. This generally results in collections of PDFs being brought together, which are neither easy to navigate, or to add to. If countries draw on different international design standards – which is often the case – there may also be conflicting standards. These need to be reconciled, so that consultants and clinicians are clear on which to follow, and the approach that healthcare providers want to take.
62 Health Estate Journal April 2022
Buro Happold has been working in Qatar with Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) to design and develop a new digital information hub, the HMC Design Standards Framework. HMC has brought together clinicians and consultants from around the world to plan, design, and build, new hospitals, and upgrade existing ones.
Essentially, a ‘knowledge hub’ like this is only useful if its information is current and regularly updated. It has to evolve and capture changing guidance and new ideas, or it won’t instil confidence that the process is offering accurate information or driving continuous improvement. This is tricky to achieve efficiently with basic files and folder structures, where volumes of documents are hard to update, and are disconnected from one other. Of course, the concept of putting all
information and development standards for a healthcare provider into one central repository is a solid one. However, we wanted to see what could be done to maximise efficiencies, and ultimately we’ve looked to software for the solution.
The Hamad Medical Corporation, Qatar A demonstration of our work in action is a ground-breaking project that Buro Happold has been working on in Qatar with Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC). Our brief was to design and develop a new digital information hub called the HMC Design Standards Framework (DSF). HMC has brought together many expert clinicians and consultants from
around the world to plan, design, and build new hospitals, as well as to upgrade existing ones. With tens of thousands of employees across the organisation, HMC challenged us to create a standardised, common approach, where facilities function and operate to the same standards.
Sean Madden, the Executive director of HMC, added: “We found that we had all of these amazing clinicians from around the world, who had differing points of view on the model of care. We wanted to share the knowledge we were gaining, and also put it together in an organised fashion where we can find things easily, search data, and publish new information.”
A ‘single source of truth’ Buro Happold responded by developing new software around a framework of managing data, building from an existing website, hosting PDFs to catalogue the information needed to plan and design facilities – essentially, a single source of truth. The Design Standards Framework is holistic, and includes everything from HMC’s national strategies and site masterplans, to more detailed site
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