“If you’ve ever dreamed of having a hospital room delivered to your front door, you’re in luck. For $285,000 you can now have a ‘smart hospital room in a box’ delivered to your house by tractor-trailer. With free shipping. Thanks to Amazon.”
So writes Ron Galloway (right), keynote speaker for the upcoming Healthcare Facilities Forum, which takes place October 3rd in Los Angeles. The room is MedModular, produced by EIR Healthcare, whose website notes, “The construction industry really needs disruption. It’s the only sector of the economy that hasn’t improved its productivity in the last 50 years.”
MedModular is just one of the disruptions Galloway has researched—though the room itself is a small thing compared to the possibility of Amazon entering the healthcare realm in a significant way. He writes about the implications of that in “The Amazon Effect on Healthcare.”
Galloway, whose firm, 818 Research, provides institutional analysis of the potential impacts of evolutionary trends and technologies in healthcare, has also been following Walmart’s impact on the realm, which he explores in “How WalMart Is Disrupting Healthcare In A Lateral Way.”
Galloway’s talk will be one highlight of the forum; another will be the announcement of the 2019 Healthcare Design Lifetime Achievement Award. Last year’s recipients, Michael L. Bobrow, FAIA, and Julia Thomas, APA, of Los Angeles-based Bobrow/Thomas and Associates, were honored for their “insistence that excellent design is not only possible for healthcare architecture, but is expected.” Their work is collected in Humanizing the Institution: The Architecture of Bobrow/Thomas Associates, and their contributions to the basic principles of hospital planning and design are captured in Building Type Basics for Healthcare Facilities, which they co-authored with Richard Kobus, Ronald Skaggs, Tom Payette, and Stephen Kliment.
This thought-provoking forum also includes numerous speakers and panelists from many of California’s healthcare systems. The full program can be found here, where you can also register. Amazon’s on the move: don’t delay.
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