Helsinki’s flagship children's hospital a case study in patient-centric design

Helsinki Children’s Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility that serves sick children from all over Finland, opened earlier this year. The building is a case study in patient-centered design and includes a number of process innovations and digital technologies, including an iPad in each patient room. Patient experience was the driver for most design decisions. Each floor contains three outdoor balconies where patients and families, or even staff, can go to relax. Another design decision made in the name of patient experience was the inclusion of open nursing stations. Other design decisions include:

• The hospital eliminated storage warehouses on each floor. Instead, surplus beds and medical devices are kept in a storage elevator which can move to any floor;
• The hospital uses RFID tags to track the movement of doctors, nurses, children and families throughout the hospital to collect data to improve efficiency and to make it easy to find nurses or specialists when they’re needed;
• To protect patient privacy, when children check in, they can select an animal avatar at a kiosk. Their avatar shows up on screens outside their room to let the family know where to go and is used in other parts of the digital system in lieu of identifying information; and
• Most rooms in the hospital are single-patient and facilitate a parent staying at a child’s side continuously. Each room has its own bathroom and a minibar, a beneficial innovation as it improved the service and decreased the work of the nursing staff.