August 06, 2019

Watch: Can Good Design Save Lives?

Can architecture improve patient care? That's the question that led to the collaboration between KieranTimberlake Research and Dr. Bon Ku, an emergency department physician and Director of Jefferson University's Health Design Lab. Faced with few precedents for how layout affects communication between doctors, nurses, and patients, our team embarked on a two-year study to quantify the relationship between quality of care and emergency room design. Though still in analysis, our work has already begun to influence the Emergency Department layout at Jefferson University Hospital and was recently featured in a video on Wired. While the study's immediate impacts are exciting, Research Director Billie Faircloth is more interested in its larger implications. “The idea that you're giving people a way to study their space, thinking through some of the interventions they want to make, that's what's actually really important about the study.”