Adventist Health System opens new Design Center on its corporate campus

Employees, executive leaders and board members recently gathered to celebrate the opening of the Adventist Health System (AHS) Design Center at the organization's corporate campus, the Mardian J. Blair Administrative Center. The AHS Design Center will serve as a platform to unlock innovative solutions to pressing challenges in health care.

'We are putting consumers at the center of care delivery, and the new design center will help us develop and implement solutions-oriented approaches that combine innovation with best-practice wholistic care to better meet the health needs of our patients and consumers,' said Terry Shaw, president/CEO for Adventist Health System.

Within the AHS Design Center, team members will apply the concept of design thinking to meet numerous objectives, including understanding and improving the consumer/patient experience, advancing processes that enhance care delivery and developing new products and services with consumers at the center. Design thinking is a methodology that incorporates empathy research, co-creation and iterative prototyping to solve complex problems and find desirable solutions.

The facility, which will be occupied by design, branding, research and marketing teams, brings all of the organization's creative services under one roof. It features an observation room with a one-way mirror to observe focus groups as they test prototypes for validation research. The open space is flexible and lends itself to collaboration and creativity, with movable, magnetic and writable walls throughout, allowing for large collaboration sessions and small break outs. It will also be used to host conferences and meetings. Two similar facilities are currently operating within AHS, one at Florida Hospital and the other at Shawnee Mission Health.

'Across the ever-changing health care landscape, innovation, technology and creativity are more present and necessary than perhaps ever before,' said David Banks, chief strategy officer for Adventist Health System. 'Utilizing rapid-cycle design, empathy through research and collaboration, the design center will be a catalyst for the delivery of transformative care in the communities we serve.'

The design center is the third building to open at AHS's corporate campus. The first was the Headquarters building, which opened in 2011 and is occupied by the organization's executive leaders and corporate services teams, and the second was the Solutions Center, which was completed in 2013 and houses the organization's award-winning information technology department. A fourth building is scheduled to open at the corporate campus in May 2018, where teams will provide recruiting, benefit, payroll and other support services for employees across the health system.