Building Safety Net Clinics--Using Evidence-Based Design: New Tool

If you work in healthcare, you're aware of the clear problems of serving the uninsured and underinsured populations. Safety net (or community) clinics help meet the needs of those patients. The design of these clinics is getting new attention thanks to the efforts of the Center for Health Design and the California HealthCare Foundation. I've been working with CHD and CHCF over the past year to design an online tool to provide information and analysis to safety net clinic designers to see the value of evidence-based design in their facilities.

Based on the findings and recommendations of CHD's 2008 report on ambulatory care clinics, I, along with web developer Wasif Butt of Western Michigan University, built an online tool to provide detailed cost-benefit results on the use of green design, the configuration of patient care areas, waiting areas, and exterior lighting. The direct financial benefits of green design alone may pay for many other design features in these facilities.

Want to try it out? Go to CHD's website at this link. Select MySNC from the top menu and check it out. You'll need to register with CHD to use the system, but this is free. Let me know what you think.

S&P Survival--A Recessionary Update

If you follow Tom Peters, you're probably familiar with his slide on the survival rates of S&P companies and Fortune 100 companies (work done by Foster and Kaplan). The problem I have when I use this slide is that the data are 25 years old (time periods ending in 1987). So, I updated the research using data from S&P companies during the "lost decade" of 1999-2009. What I found was intriguing and resulted in some clear lessons for organizations seeking to survive recessions. Read my work at changethis.com--it's a published article in the August 2011 online edition. The bottom line is that success in a recessionary time is a function of forward-looking management, being in the right markets, and making some critical decisions based on future scenarios, not extrapolating from past performance.