SANTA ROSA, Calif.—Accretive Realty Advisors, an Orange County-headquartered healthcare real estate developer, is planning to build a four-story, 93,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art medical office building and adjacent parking structure two blocks from Memorial Hospital in Santa Rosa.

Designed by renowned architect Gensler, the highly efficient and accessible Brookwood Medical will support health and wellness through careful attention to an elevated patient experience. The facility’s roadside visibility and dedicated patient drop-off/pick-up area will ease patients and visitors into a welcoming lobby imbued with a calming, natural feel. The building’s plans will allow doctors to design specialized spaces to optimize patient service and be capable of accommodating outpatient surgery, diagnostic imaging and multi-specialty services. Additionally, a walking path will be renovated along Santa Rosa Creek that easily and conveniently connects Brookwood Medical to Memorial Hospital.

“Our buildings are developed for patients, as well as doctors, with an emphasis on delivering the most modernized and technologically advanced care within sustainable and comforting environments,” says Accretive CEO Thomas LeBeau. “Our clients are not just the medical professionals in the buildings we design and manage, but also the people who come to visit them. We’re confident that our people-centric mindset benefits doctors and patients alike.”

In addition to the advanced design and patient care features, Brookwood Medical will have technologically advanced energy features for renewable energy generation and the ability to function at times without sourced power, such as solar paneling, battery backup storage and backup generators.

Brookwood Medical will be Accretive’s first development in Northern California. Accretive identified Santa Rosa and Sonoma County with a growing market that has outpaced the healthcare needs and capacity of the region. With the exception of hospital and support facilities developed by the region’s major healthcare providers, this will be Santa Rosa’s first developer-led building designed exclusively for medical offices since 1983.

According to Accretive’s real estate broker for Brookwood Medical, Garth Hogan, who serves as executive managing director of the Healthcare West division for Newmark Knight Frank, “Sonoma County’s many functionally obsolete medical buildings make the area ripe for more — and more modernized — health care.”

Brookwood Medical was approved by the City of Santa Rosa’s Design Review Board and is pending for final City approval. Once approved, Accretive anticipates that construction will begin in Q1 2023. Discussions between Accretive and potential tenants are underway.

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SAN FRANCISCO—Gensler, the world’s largest designer and architecture firm, recently published a study called “Transforming Healthcare,” whose aim was to examine the potential means for healthcare construction and future clinical layouts amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Gensler’s Health & Wellness division commissioned the study as well as interviewed field experts to determine precisely what the healthcare environment will look like as the world comes to terms with a new reality for treating patients in the clinical setting, where safety and separation of patients from medical staff has taken on a new urgency thanks to the transmissibility of the COVID-19 virus.

According to the study, it is now incumbent upon healthcare facilities to foster “an environment that feels safe and [makes] patients and employees feel valued, while re-confirming that their health matters.” Accordingly, the next step in healthcare delivery will require not returning to the status quo of the pre-COVID times, but rather necessitate taking the approach that “this disruption is an opportunity to reimagine the delivery of care.”

If high-volume patient care is ever to be viable again, Gensler found that “a carefully choreographed course of immediate actions and long-term efforts” will be needed. This will require not only a refocus on the part of clinicians, but also reassuring patients and their families that it is safe to even visit a hospital for care. “The strategy of getting patients and staff back into clinical environments is to reduce fear, rebuild trust, reassure, and communicate clearly how their well-being is considered,” Gensler’s study found.

The best defense against hospital-wide infection is a good offense, the study’s authors advise, which can be accomplished in redesigned healthcare environments through such common-sense measures as distancing workstations adequately, employing one-way airflow, extensive hand-sanitizing stations and adjusting staff and patient-arrival schedules to a more phased approach.

Gensler advises redesigning the physical layout of healthcare spaces to better facilitate a reduction in contact in waiting areas and examination rooms. Contactless interactions and “smart building technologies” are recommended as well.

Key to the success of any such future endeavors is that hospitals and other healthcare spaces take a systemic approach to enhance the patient experience as well as reduce the chances of cross-contamination and infections being spread in the clinical setting.

Furthemore, Gensler’s study found that the public has greatly shed its confidence in the ability of healthcare spaces to foster this very kind of safe atmosphere. Correspondingly, the audit advises that it will be incumbent upon healthcare settings to not only reconfigure their spaces to head off disease transmission but also to restore “lost confidence” that the coronavirus pandemic has made endemic in much of the public when it comes to feeling safe in a healthcare setting. Gensler said that designers should therefore focus on creating what they call “Humane Healthcare” that addresses those very concerns.

The June report from Gensler, commissioned under the firm’s Global Health & Wellness department, carries recommendations not just for Gensler properties but for all those firms that work in the healthcare sector moving forward.

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