Center for Health Organization Transformation partners with global architectural firm HKS, Inc.

HKS, Inc. is the first architecture firm to join the Center for Health Organization Transformation (CHOT) at the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health. The design firm’s involvement will help to expand the dialogue on how the built environment can inform and support emerging models of care.

CHOT is an industry-university cooperative research center (I/UCRC) funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and industry members. The organization is focused on producing major innovations in health care delivery by conducting research to support the implementation of evidence-based transformational strategies within health care organizations. Their research model relies on the knowledge and experience of health care leaders and practitioners to guide academic research.

“This cooperative model ensures that the research is both meaningful and applicable to the health care industry and provides immediate decision support for our CHOT industry members, such as HKS,” said Bita Kash, Ph.D., M.B.A., FACHE, director of CHOT and associate professor at the Texas A&M School of Public Health.

“The involvement of facility design firms is important to this dialogue because the design and implementation of highly effective, innovative and evidence-based models of care will eventually translate into new requirements on effective use of space while engaged in these emerging models of care,” Kash continued.

With a broad focus on models of cancer care, CHOT’s Texas A&M team will explore how facilities can support precise and personalized medicine. The research will be conducted by Texas A&M students in public health and architecture and be overseen by Kash and Upali Nanda, Ph.D., director of research at HKS and executive director of the Center for Advanced Design Research and Evaluation (CADRE).

“We are excited to connect our place-based research efforts at HKS with the industry-recognized strategies in evidence-based health management and clinical practices of CHOT,” said Jeff Stouffer, FAIA, executive principal and global health practice leader of HKS, Inc. “Together, we can make great strides to investigate, validate and implement innovations in health care design and delivery.”

CHOT researchers and health care practitioners have designed, implemented and evaluated new models of care delivery in emergency department’s operating rooms as part of a coordinated perioperative care model in the primary care setting and the community for almost a decade. Innovations in care delivery should be followed by innovations in facility design for space to align with these new activities and requirement of emerging models of care.

HKS, Inc. with over 25 offices worldwide is ranked among the top health care architectural firms in the world by Modern Healthcare and BD World Architecture and focuses on innovative health care design, process and delivery.