Quality in Healthcare: An Innovative Adaptable System for In-patient Rooms

This article aims to study methodologically hospital buildings and, in particular, the design of inpatient rooms, identified as the place of maximum convergence between the renewed framework of the hospital and its users. The definition of design guidelines to improve and qualify the in-patient rooms, enhancing their performance, takes into account the fact that the established requirements of medical protocols must be accompanied by those new requirements related to the massive evolution in health organizations. Changes in medicine, culture and society have necessarily led to a new formulation of the hospital model and, over the last few decades, the massive introduction of technology within the hospital has conditioned the morphological-space configuration and the presence of new relationships and spatial functions in the hospitals. The research of this article attempts, therefore, to explore the use of technology to improve the quality of patient rooms' design, formulating a model that can adapt to economic, social, health and technological changes, and, at the same time, can ensure that the system, services and activities meet the evolving needs of the populatio