As part of its non-traditional, alternate-site-of-care growth initiative, Gresham Smith’s Healthcare market kicked off 2024 with a focus on getting one step closer to understanding what healthcare delivery will look like in the future—particularly in light of the increasing role of AI.
Under the market’s leadership, and in collaboration with leaders across the firm’s healthcare studios, the team united around the goal of generating excitement about reimagining the future of healthcare. Participating in Healthcare Design magazine’s annual “Breaking Through” conceptual design competition provided the perfect platform to launch this unique exercise.
Breaking Free from Constraints
The competition invited healthcare designers to imagine a future society and its challenges, encouraging participants to set aside current constraints—such as regulations, deadlines, codes, and budgets—and to rethink healthcare delivery beyond today’s limitations. The exercise brought together motivated and creative professionals across Gresham Smith’s healthcare offices, fostering collaboration to tackle abstract, complex, and open-ended challenges.
Integrated & Seamless
From this collaboration emerged “Invisible,” a visionary response to the competition’s prompt, illustrating how architectural innovation could address anticipated challenges in future healthcare delivery. “We envision the future of healthcare as a lifestyle so seamlessly woven into our daily experience that it’s essentially invisible,” explains Healthcare market design leader Chris Hoal.
“One reason we believe this is the direction society is heading is that technology is becoming smaller and more affordable every day, while markets are demanding more personalized, on-demand and unified services. Additionally, anything that can be executed by AI eventually will be. We see these trends leading us to a point where healthcare becomes both integrated and seamless.”
New Generations, A New Vision of Care
Leveraging AI and edge computing, “Invisible” predicts a future without traditional hospitals, where healthcare is embedded in our daily lives, alleviating the isolation, sterility, and stress often associated with healthcare environments. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for adaptable, resilient healthcare solutions, revealing how swiftly the sector can evolve in response to unprecedented challenges.
“Despite the perception that healthcare is slow-moving, the pandemic offered a brief glimpse of what the future of healthcare could hold,” says Project Executive and Healthcare Strategy Leader Kalpana Mohanraj. “Healthcare institutions had to evolve rapidly to adapt. Across all of this change, technology has played a crucial role in supporting the innovation in care delivery, driven by both the urgent needs of people during the pandemic and the rapid advancements in technology that responded to those needs.
Understanding the factors that drive change in healthcare—such as technological advances and demographic shifts—is critical. For example, as baby boomers transition to Medicare, millennials, Gen X, and Gen Z are emerging as the primary consumers of healthcare. These groups place an overall emphasis on convenience, reflecting a social shift in how they access care. This evolution will shape future healthcare experiences.”
Invisible Yet Omnipresent
This aspirational exercise in predicting healthcare’s future not only fostered collaboration among Gresham Smith’s healthcare designers but also expanded the firm’s design thinking as it explores non-traditional sites of care with a future-focused approach. “Our entry for the “Breaking Through” competition was unique because we didn’t design a building or traditional architecture,” says Hoal. “It was really a depiction of society, featuring several unexpected or opportunistic healthcare innovations.
“The typical architectural section, diagram, plan, and perspective weren’t suitable for conveying a vision of a future society. So, we turned to video and storytelling to illustrate people living in a world where healthcare has become invisible. An interesting parallel is that generative AI is transforming architectural design representation at the same time it’s revolutionizing healthcare delivery.”
Taking a holistic approach, the “Invisible” concept highlights the importance of understanding the patient journey. By focusing on a patient’s experiences and emotions, designers can shift their attention away from the typical conventions of healthcare and prioritize what truly enhances a person’s quality of life.
“In this vision of the future, healthcare becomes an integral part of our daily lives,” says Hoal. “We start the story with ‘Harold,’ who faces daily stressors. An AI monitoring his health identifies his condition: ‘You’re stressed. You’re experiencing anxiety, which is leading to depression.’ The solution is convenient—on his way home from work, Harold stops at a Wellness Park, a community space designed to integrate behavioral healthcare into a healing, green environment. There, he finds a quiet pod to meet with his AI therapist, fitting therapy seamlessly into his schedule. This reimagining of future care delivery not only improves access to mental healthcare but also reduces its associated stigma.”
Hoal concludes: “It’s exciting to think that healthcare designers will soon be free to envision healthcare as experiences rather than buildings or places. Traditionally, healthcare services have been aggregated in centralized locations like hospitals due to cost limitations—big, expensive equipment that required dedicated spaces and services that had to be delivered on-site by human providers. But as AI and cloud computing continuously analyze our health in the background, pinpointing early precursors of disease, this paradigm is changing. Expensive equipment is becoming smaller, more affordable, and widely distributed, while diagnostics and screening are increasingly taking place in the home or directly on the body.
As a result, many of the hospital departments we see today will dissolve into systems rather than spaces. This shift expands the role of healthcare design into all facets of people’s lives, creating a future where healthcare is truly invisible yet omnipresent.”
“We turned to video and storytelling to illustrate people living in a world where healthcare has become invisible.”
— Chris Hoal, Healthcare Market Design Leader
