Senior Planner Jessica Sweeney took a unique path to planning healthcare environments at BWBR. With a background that helps bridge the challenges health organizations face with the solutions architecture can provide, her specialized insight brings key value to our design teams and client stakeholders. In this episode of Side Notes, she shares her fascinating career journey and how it lends itself to creating high-performing facilities that are data-informed, staff-friendly, and patient-centric.
The Path to Planner
Jessica attended law school, where she focused on healthcare law, and received her law degree while also completing a Master of Public Health (MPH). “I decided that working for a law firm was not going to fulfill my happiness going forward, and so I went into an administrative fellowship role,” Jessica explains. “I went out to Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems (EMHS), and I worked under their C-suite, under their administrative team, and learned the business of healthcare.”
Her first role was in innovation and strategy, helping EMHS move from a fee-for-service model into a value-based care model. Then, wanting to get back to her Midwestern roots in Wisconsin, she took an operational leadership role with SSM Health focused on oncology, palliative care, and infusion services. Beyond the important task of caring for people when they’re sick, Jessica wanted to explore questions that would help healthcare work for everybody, including: “How do we keep healthy people healthy? How do we affect the health of our communities? And what roles and responsibilities do healthcare organizations have in that function?”
When SMM began the design of a new medical office building, Jessica felt like the process could be improved upon. “As a leader, I think connection with our healthcare teams was something that I felt we could do in a way that worked better for the healthcare teams and for the purpose of the building,” she explains. “And then I had a friend who worked for BWBR and they said that this role was up, so I started exploring and I talked to some folks and wanted to see what BWBR was all about.”
Better Buildings, Healthier Communities
Jessica saw the opportunity to help the design process work better for all stakeholders, resulting in better facilities and therefore healthier communities. “BWBR was focused on what healthcare could be. So it’s how we put spaces together for what somebody says they need and really marrying that to this idea that we can drive healthcare forward, we can operate in a different way.”
Equipped with practical knowledge from her time inside hospitals and clinics, she can ask the right questions to best understand an organization’s needs and functions to plan strategically for the future. “But then I’m also working with those healthcare teams to ask the right questions of the architectural group. Oftentimes it’s a go-between,” she explains. “It’s a bit of a definitional role where we have our own language in the architectural world, and healthcare has their own language. How do we make sure that we’re speaking that same language and also developing that connection with our healthcare teams.”
Her deep understanding of challenges like staffing shortages, shifting payment models, and tight margins informs how our design teams plan more efficient spaces, “thinking about what’s the right number of rooms, what is the right room organization, and how we define those rooms.” Jessica shares that it’s important to balance current needs, potential growth, and the ever-shifting landscape of healthcare. “By getting into the utilization of spaces, I can work with our team to lay them out in a way that makes sense for the care that they’re providing today and for the care that they might need to provide in the future.”
Partnering with Providers
In an uncertain time for healthcare, with concerns about funding paired with aging infrastructure, Jessica says that strong partnerships are critical. “I feel like BWBR is positioned well to help be partners with our clients,” Jessica shares. “We call them partners because we want to build those relationships and help healthcare work for everybody.”
Jessica keeps her finger on the pulse of healthcare’s future and looks to the latest research for the most promising solutions. In many rural hospitals, “we have failing infrastructure because everything is 50 to 60 years old, so how do we support the mechanical structures? How do we support all of those pieces and keep these facilities thriving?” Meanwhile, “we know that the inpatient world needs to grow because of the patients that are coming up, but we also need to stop taking care of patients in an inpatient setting that need to be in an outpatient setting. So, how do we support our partners in that endeavor?”
The stakes are high for good design “because we don’t have the funds to get it wrong,” she says. But, by building strong relationships with organizations and leveraging the first-hand knowledge of colleagues like Jessica, we can work together to create resilient facilities that will support providers, patients, and communities for years to come.
