Case Studies Healthcare

It’s a disturbing but realistic analogy that Robert Thompson cites. Stringent aviation rules and regulations notwithstanding, commercial airliners crash, however infrequently. And should it be found that the company was cutting corners on maintenance, the boss had better expect repercussions. Now let’s look at hospitals, says Thompson, who’s fashioned a long and productive career as […]

To most, the saying “giving 110 percent” is considered a positive one. For the folks at Texas Children’s Hospital, however, the idiom had taken on a slightly different meaning in the fall of 2013: The facility was consistently over capacity, and the impacts—on patients and physicians alike—were starting to take a toll. That November, leaders […]

It’s an exciting, and maybe overdue, concept in modern health care—the so-called microhospital. Capable of providing emergency—even trauma—treatment while sparing the patient what’s almost certain to be a longer wait in a big-city ER, microhospitals are a significant upgrade from urgent care centers and have been springing up and operating around the clock in a […]

It might be one of the unintended consequences of the relaxation of marijuana laws, if not the outright legalization in some states, with New York soon likely to be among them. “With pot being legalized in so many places, the drug cartels are turning to heroin and fentanyl,” says Scott Burman, the president of the […]

It’s about meeting the very overdue need of tending to the mental health of some of the most vulnerable children and teens in California’s Orange County. The specialized nature of such treatment being what it is, the standards of CHOC Children’s Mental Health Inpatient Center had to exceed the very stringent codes by which the […]

Marvin Smith once managed large airfield maintenance and construction for the U.S. Air Force. Today, he’s focused on intricate medical complexes. Ultimately, the two endeavors aren’t all that different, the civil engineer says. Both are pressure-filled, require significant attention to detail and allow little margin for error. “I do enjoy the challenges,” says Smith, assistant […]

It takes a team to perform even the most minor operation, and a major one was about to get underway a couple of years ago at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The patient being the flagship Advanced Health Sciences Pavilion of the huge hospital. The locale being urban Los Angeles, the stakes couldn’t have been much higher […]

It’s a fact of construction life that the bosses have been bemoaning for years. Though the trades are teeming with opportunities, there’s not a rush of young men and women to be electricians, mechanics, pipefitters, masons, painters, plumbers, carpenters and all the other vocational roles so necessary in bringing a blueprint’s intent to fruition. As […]