AI may prove consequential “in the distributed, high-volume world of outpatient care, because it changes not only how we draw these buildings but how they perform.”
So writes Charles Michelson, AIA, ACHA, LEED AP, president of Saltz Michelson Architects, in an article for South Florida Hospital News & Healthcare Report.
Mr. Michelson notes that AI is “already reshaping the earliest and most difficult phase of our work: programming and planning.” He adds that “the near future is more ambitious. Digital twins, living models fed by a facility’s own data, will let us observe a clinic network in operation and continuously refine it, closing the loop between design intent and operational reality across a whole hub-and-spoke system.”
What excites him most, he writes, is “AI’s potential to return time to caregivers. In outpatient settings, where a provider may see dozens of patients a day, intelligent handling of documentation, translation, and routine monitoring frees clinicians for the human work only they can do, and our buildings must support that restored attention rather than compete with it. The best care environments have always been quietly therapeutic; AI gives us new instruments to make them responsive as well.”
He also issues a few warnings, noting that AI tools are “not a substitute for wisdom” because “they inherit the assumptions in their data, and a flawed dataset can encode a flawed workflow into a building meant to serve a community for decades.”
Read Mr. Michelson’s full article here.
