Senior Living design is not for the faint of heart. Successful projects often depend on a Design Team’s ability to skillfully merge design considerations inherent to a wide range of project typologies including: Hospitality Design, Education, Multi-Family Residential, Urban Planning and yes… Healthcare Design. Emerging Senior Living design trends, and the need to consider how these trends might benefit a given project, may (for better or worse) color longstanding perceptions of what “traditional” Senior Living spaces should look like. This article focuses on three trends that highlight a growing focus on Healthcare and healthcare design considerations within the Senior Living project type.
Telehealth Considerations
It’s no surprise that the explosive growth of telehealth services has perfectly coincided with the growth of the older peri-covid patient, increasingly older Senior Living residents, and an exploding elderly population that are all, often times, one and the same. Emerging Covid therapeutic options, though praised for helping to lessen concerns associated with how the disease will impact the elderly, have had little impact on the financial burdens placed on healthcare systems in the wake of the global pandemic. On the other hand, the government incentivized use of telehealth [an emerging trend during the pandemic], helped providers bridge a concerning accessibility gap while also providing some financial relief in the form of funding and grants, payment parity and regulatory flexibility. The magnitude of this financial relief has been steadily eroding as some programs (such as the CARES Act) have been pared back over time.
But, what has not been diminished is the newly found view of telehealth’s place as a legitimate alternative to more traditional delivery of care models both, within the healthcare as well as within the senior living space. “Lessons learned,” particularly those which are easily quantifiable, data-driven and evidence-based in nature, are already being used to define the Senior Living model of the future. Consider for example that Predictive Technologies, an offshoot of telehealth which helps to enable proactive interactions between clinicians and patients, is increasingly being adopted in Senior Living design as a direct reaction to the type of “delay of care” concerns that providers experienced throughout the Covid pandemic. Patient tracking and remote monitoring, which trigger a clinical emergency response, are also examples of Senior Living design trends that have find their respective origins in the “tech”, the telehealth and the broader healthcare arena.
On-Campus Medical Services
The expanding role of On-Campus Medical Services would appear to contradict the Telehealth assertions previously discussed. But, the two are not at odds with each other especially when considering the drivers behind each of these trends. Access, for example, is the single biggest factor driving partnerships between the Medical community and Senior Living organizations. The idea is not entirely new and we need only look as far as applied Community Health theories to understand the benefit of access in the delivery of care continuum and, more importantly, a health care approach that advocates for prevention over treatment. Not only are the two trends not at odds with each other, but they can in fact be complimentary to one another. Consider for example partnerships where healthcare systems lease space at senior living facilities. These partnerships can address access-driven-concerns through on-site, team-based care models, that provide the remote monitoring and data-tracking needs integral to the success of both, the telehealth senior living component, and the on-campus medical service offerings.
Expanded Health and Wellness Offerings
The list of “lessons learned,” especially those that which have evolved post-Covid pandemic, can at times feel infinite… if not extensive. Take for example studies showing the propensity for large scale healthcare outbreaks to physically, emotionally, and mentally, affect even those who never contracted the disease. Months of isolation, and physical inactivity, have been linked to growing cases of stroke and heart disease even when excluding high risk populations such as the elderly or the already chronically ill. This correlation is not news to Senior Living communities that have, for decades, made wellness offerings an integral part of their programming mix. What is new is a growing awareness for wellness considerations that support business imperatives and vice versa. A great example of this is a growing trend in Senior Living communities for expanded wellness perspectives that lead to improved continuum of care outcomes for residents, as well as a quantifiable “return on investment” that can be measured in terms of both: demand for spaces within these Senior Living communities and high occupancy rates within these same communities.
A Healthcare Designer’s take
Healthcare and Senior Living designers face the challenge of overlapping design considerations that have been, historically speaking, exclusive to their respective design disciplines. These “challenges,” as is often the case, may in fact give way to design opportunities which can in turn open the door to truly unique design solutions. Regardless, there is much that can be gained by growing our understanding of the trends driving evolution within each of these respective markets, which includes how Telehealth, On-Campus Medical Services and Expanded Healthcare Offerings trends can benefit both, Healthcare and Senior Living environments.