Healthcare – building for health.
A holistic approach to all the tasks involved: that's IB's strength – especially when it comes to every healthcare project we undertake. Planning and building healthcare infrastructures to avoid renovations after only a short period of operation presents demanding and complex challenges that we've tackled time and again over the last 100 years.
Existing hospital infrastructures have to meet changing requirements, while developments in medical technology and digitalisation are moving at a breathtaking pace. These trends pose enormous challenges not only for us as planners, but also for building owners, contractors and users. Digitalisation and the functional transfer of services from inpatient to outpatient provision mean that building structures must be both fit-for-purpose and flexible.
Real-time communication and working with digital support from smart programmes, apps and robots: these developments are opening up new perspectives as well as reducing time expended and distances covered. Infrastructures are utilised optimally and resources can be conserved because less overall space is required. Digital decentralisation of processes is therefore a sustainable trend that allows fast response times – a factor that is literally a matter of life and death in a hospital.
IB Healthcare draws on its expertise in process thinking to address the conflicting interests arising from today's tasks. We apply state-of-the-art BIM (Building Information Modelling) planning methodology based on 3D models. This allows us to network all the steps in planning our healthcare buildings between the planning team and the building owner/contractor – a digital approach that is secure and reliable. BIM gives us a high degree of data transparency and opens up opportunities for optimisation within planning processes. It significantly improves investment and operating cost efficiency at the same time. Alongside these benefits, process and workflow optimisations open up creative scope for us to implement all our design ideas.
Core Hospital
We regard intelligent health master plans, sustainable building structures and separate-system thinking as essential. This is in keeping (for example) with the core hospital – a concept we have long been developing and pursuing at IB Healthcare. The core hospital is based on a distinction between concentrated services – with all the core and special functions in the hospital infrastructure – and associated satellite-like healthcare functions in an accessible surrounding environment. Today, the "central-decentralised" core hospital concept meets the all-important fundamental requirements for sustainability, and it brings the major advantages of digitalisation to bear in medical technology.
We have also gained insights from the pandemic experience that are essential in the context of capacity and flexibility issues – most of all when it comes to strategic future planning of hospital infrastructures. We integrate all these considerations into our concepts, especially when working on healthcare projects. Emergency scenarios in particular are playing an increasingly important role here: examples of this trend include the flexible expansion of intensive care and surgical units, and alternative models of decentralised care that enable effective use of core healthcare areas in an emergency.
IB Healthcare focuses consistently on all developments and issues in the healthcare sector that yield sustainable solutions for our clients and their work processes.
And we've been pursuing this approach ever since our first hospital planning project for the Lory Hospital in Bern, one hundred years ago.