????醫療業一向有些平淡無奇。政府管制、缺乏透明度的醫保政策，還有護理病患的繁重工作構成了一個錯綜復雜的網絡，時尚元素在里面基本沒有多少容身之地。身在其中的工作人員也很少會有余暇退后一步，審視一下整個醫療體系，同時反思一下，如果有人能放慢節奏、認真思索一些具體問題，就能了解哪些做法是行之有效的，哪些無法奏效，以及哪些方面能有所改觀。醫療業的這個特點決定了，這個行業里實際上沒人有時間、有興趣考慮設計的作用。

????據一些建筑師和設計師反映，在設計上缺乏思考正是醫療業之所以在眾多方面難以達標的重要原因。畢竟設計不是光關乎形式，它還與功能休戚相關。薩莉?惠特曼說：“我們認為，設計擁有推動各個行業實現變革的潛力，正像它已在電子工業、汽車業和其他眾多領域所表現的那樣。但在醫療業，我們還沒有系統地開發設計的潛能。”

????惠特曼是NXT Health的執行總監，這是一家致力于醫療業設計的非營利組織。用她的說法就是，這是一家醫療業長期以來一直付之闕如的研發工作室。它于2006年經美國國防部（Department of Defense）批準成立。當時國防部要求由這家機構主導，與其他機構合作設計未來的病房——不是充滿未來感的手術室，也不是一套全新的治療技術，而是能在個體層面上改善療效的病房。這種病房本身及其設計原則幾經改變，但基本目標始終如一：嚴格地通過更好的設計，而不是什么顛覆行業的技術突破或聯邦法律的強制要求，來為病患創造更好的護理體驗。

????現在，這種種努力的最終成果終于橫空出世了。它名為“2020病房”（Patient Room 2020 ），這個月在位于紐約的杜邦可麗耐設計工作室（the DuPont Corian Design Studio）正式揭幕。從表面上看，現在的病房和未來的病房之間的差別可能主要體現在裝修上。但NXT Health團隊與其合作者——30多位來自各行業的合作伙伴，他們分別貢獻了打造這個樣板病房所需的技術、材料和技術訣竅——堅稱，看待“2020病房”不應該只著眼于表面價值。對供病人和醫護人員所用的各種技術進行簡化和整合可能看似容易，重新設計過的衛生間也頗為美觀，但這支團隊表示，這些改變真正代表的是對病人所處的環境從整體上所做的重新思考。多年來，這個環境在很大程度上一直都一成不變。

????國際建筑公司斯堪斯卡公司（Skanska）是“2020病房”項目的合作者之一。安德魯?奎克是該公司美國分公司的卓越醫療中心（Health Care Center of Excellence）資深副總裁。他說：“醫療業正處在發展的十字路口，從臨床角度看，它正在經歷一場顛覆性的變革。所以，現在當你開始關注醫院的建筑環境時，就不能指望今后還像過去幾十年一樣用同樣的方式、在同樣的空間提供醫療服務。”?

????There's very little that's sexy about the health care industry. Within the tangled threads connecting government regulation, opaque insurance policies, and the actual work of patient care itself, there's not a lot of room for glitz or style, and certainly very little time for those working within the health care machine to step back, take inventory of the larger system, and reflect on what's working, what's not, and what could be better if only someone would stop and think through certain problems. This aspect of health care ensures that virtually nobody in the industry has the time or the inclination to dwell on the role of design.

????According to a small group of architects and designers, this lack of design-thinking is precisely why the health care industry struggles to deliver on so many levels. Design, after all, isn't just about form. It's about function. "We think that design has the power to revolutionize industries, just as it has in electronics, in cars, in everything else," Salley Whitman says. "But in health care we haven't tapped into that in a systematic way."

????Whitman is the Executive Director of NXT Health, a non-profit health care design organization that she describes as something like the research and development shop that the health care industry has always lacked. NXT Health got its start back in 2006 via a Department of Defense grant asking the organization to lead a design collaboration in producing the hospital room of the future -- not a futuristic operating theater or a suite of new treatment technologies, but a patient room that could improve health care outcomes at the individual level. The room itself and the design principles underpinning it have undergone some changes and alterations in the interim, but fundamentally the objective has remained the same: to create better patient care strictly through better design -- no game-changing technological breakthroughs or federal legislation required.

????The final product of that effort -- christened Patient Room 2020 -- was unveiled this month at the DuPont Corian Design Studio in New York City. On its face the differences between the patient room of the present and the patient room of the future might appear largely cosmetic. But the NXT Health team and its collaborators -- more than 30 industry partners kicked in technology, materials, and know-how to produce the prototype -- insist that Patient Room 2020 not be taken at, well, face value. The streamlining and packaging of disparate technologies for patient and caregiver use might seem like obvious solutions, the redesign of the bathroom a nice aesthetic touch. But what this really represents, the team says, is a wholesale rethinking of the patient environment, which has remained largely unchanged for decades.

????"The health care industry itself is really at a crossroads, it's really being turned upside down from a clinical perspective," says Andrew Quirk, senior vice president for the Health Care Center of Excellence at the U.S. outpost of global construction firm Skanska (SKBSY), a collaborator on the Patient Room 2020 project. "So when you turn to the built environment, you can't expect to deliver health care in the future the same way -- and in the same space -- as you did in the last few decades."?