(Productivity Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- Instead of building new hospitals that import old systems and problems, the time has come to reexamine many of our ideas about what a hospital should be. Can a building foster continuous improvement? How can we design it to be flexible and useful well into the future? How can we do more with less?

Answering these questions and more, Lean-Led Hospital Design: Creating the Efficient Hospital of the Future by Naida Grunden and Charles Hagood (Productivity Press, 2012) explains how hospitals can be built to increase patient safety and reduce wait times while eliminating waste, lowering costs, and easing some of health care’s most persistent problems. It supplies a simplified timeline of architectural planning—from start to finish—to guide readers through the various stages of the lean design development philosophy, including lean architectural design and lean work design. It includes examples from several real health-care facility design and construction projects, as well as interviews with hospital leaders and architects.

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