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By Alan Joch

Underpinning these scalability needs is a wireless communications infrastructure that delivers patient records, radiology images, CAT scans, and other essential information to each bedside, with doctors receiving the data via handheld organizers. “If we can get [patient] information right into a doctor’s hand, he or she can make a decision based on that knowledge,” says Feied.

Larger, more flexible treatment rooms address scalability but also create new challenges. Cumulatively, the bigger rooms add up to a larger area that health care workers must traverse as they assess and treat patients. Feied believes motorized Segway transporters—which have been mostly gee-whiz techno-toys to date—may provide a solution. “We’re convinced that they can transform hospital design,” he says. “We could build an ER that’s three football fields long, yet still practical” if the plan called for “Segway corridors,” like HOV lanes on highways, that allowed caregivers to travel through the hospital at high speed, he says.

Iimages: Courtesy Washington Hospital Center

ER One also proposes to implement a special ventilation system to prevent the spread of SARS or infectious diseases. “The typical emergency department has one or two isolation rooms,” says Dr. Mark Smith, chair of emergency medicine at WHC. “But in ER One, every room is designed to be an isolation room.” The ventilation system would be compartmentalized on a room-by-room basis, so that failures are kept local.

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Hospital staff and designers are also considering installing video cameras in ER One, in which real-time images of patients would be beamed across the wireless network to handheld organizers carried by health care workers, allowing them to see patients in need of medical attention even if they are not in the immediate vicinity.

Ultimately, ER One is still just a concept—what’s built may not resemble what’s in the plans right now. But Jon Pickard, AIA, a principal of Pickard Chilton of New Haven and an architect who helped design the ER One prototype, enjoyed the process of “pushing the envelope.” The architecture firm HKS in Dallas and Ralph Hawkins, chief executive officer, were the lead designers on the project. “We saw this as a mission to make a safer world,” Pickard says. “We broke down all the normal formulaic approaches to designing for health care.”