Don't Forget the Operations Planning

Don't forget the operations planning. Sometimes hospital leaders get myopic when they build. They focus on the new and neglect to plan for how the facility will be most efficiently used. Frank Kittredge is a senior principal and national practice leader for the Facility Planning Practice at the Noblis Center for Health Innovation, where he helps develop and implement enterprise strategy, clinical service strategy, facility solutions and stakeholder alignment. Frank and I talked about his focus on ways to bring more robust operational planning into facility planning. The way he put it to me is that hospitals planning to spend tens or hundreds of millions on new construction often conduct only a cursory review of how the hospital or other healthcare entity is going to deliver care more efficiently or more effectively once the bricks are laid. Of course, by then, it's largely too late.