Designing for Medical Teamwork: Evaluating Layout Characteristics for Supporting Team-Based Care in Mayo Clinic

Fatemeh Motamed Rastegar (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Effective multidisciplinary teamwork is increasingly important as medical care becomes more complex and expensive, and it is particularly important for primary care, with a wide range of demands and very high pressures for productivity. While it has been widely reported that work-space layout significantly affects team collaboration, most spatial variables are based on typology or poorly defined, such as “open-plan” or “cellular”. To develop and test more specific design variables we have developed and refined a method named ‘Functional Scenario Analysis’ (FSA) to translate needs of different team members as main stakeholders into spatial relationships that can be quantified.

In this study, we applied this method to evaluate the performance of the team work-spaces in five Mayo Primary Care Clinics.

The first step of the FSA is identifying the users of the space and defining their particular needs relying on published literature, Mayo Clinic guidelines, and field observations. Those needs are described in form of statements that we call functional scenarios. Then, we develop spatial metrics that quantify spatial affordance of those users’ needs. Using different analytic tools, we perform a spatial assessment of clinics’ layouts and evaluate their performance by comparing results across case studies. Finally, we determine design features that enable higher performance of the team working space.

We identified ten specific Functional Scenarios of the team members that can be divided into two types:

1) Personal or individual needs of each team member for situational awareness, communication, respite, and privacy; 2) The need of each team member to interact with other team members.

For this project, we developed twenty metrics using four spatial analysis measures: visual integrity, visibility, proximity, and pathway integrity. Furthermore, we translate the detailed analysis into meaningful recommendations for retrofitting the existing or designing new primary care clinics.