Changemaker

John Kouletsis is the national director of strategy, planning, and design with Kaiser Permanente’s National Facilities Services (NFS) in Oakland, California. As the largest managed care organization in the United States, Kaiser Permanente (KP) has 8.8 million health plan members, 167,178 employees, 15,853 physicians, 37 medical centers, and more than 500 medical offices/outpatient buildings in nine U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

While at NFS, Kouletsis has been responsible for developing the KP Standards Program. He has also been the program director for Templates 2000, an initiative to research all of the clinical spaces that KP builds and test them with frontline staff in terms of function and workflow. Extensive internal and external benchmarking, as well as design sessions with more than 1,000 clinicians and support staff over a period of 18 months, built the basis for KP’s Standards Program as it exists today.

Kouletsis is also the executive director for KP’s Templated Hospital Project, hospital of the future project, and High Performance Buildings Initiative. His department is responsible for the continuous development and improvement of the KP Standards Program, and he is one of the sponsors of the Sidney R. Garfield Centers for Health Care Innovation. Prior to joining the NFS Core Group, Kouletsis worked as a project manager at KP’s Vallejo Medical Center. 

Kouletsis spent the first 15 years of his career as an architect in architecture and engineering firms that specialized in healthcare design. His clients included Kaiser Permanente, as well as other healthcare providers in the United States and Japan.

He is a graduate of the University of Southern California and did postgraduate research at the Department of Engineering at Kyoto University in Japan.

A member of the Facility Guidelines Institute’s Healthcare Guidelines Revision Committee and EDAC (Evidence-Based Design Accreditation and Certification) Advisory Council, Kouletsis is a contributor and frequent participant in the Hospital and Healthcare Environments of the Future working sessions at the Health Technology Center in San Francisco. He has spoken widely on design excellence, high-performance design, and sustainable design and operations.

And, this year, Kouletsis is the winner of The Center for Health Design’s annual Changemaker Award, which was presented to him in November at the HEALTHCARE DESIGN Conference in Nashville. The award is given by The Center’s board of directors to an individual or group that has demonstrated the exceptional ability to affect change in healthcare facility design.

Earlier this year, I caught up with Kouletsis on a beautiful August day at his office, located in a high-rise building in Oakland, California. Given all his responsibilities, he can be hard to pin down for a conversation. But he was relaxed and reflective about his career and the impact both he and Kaiser Permanente have had on the healthcare design industry. We spoke for a little longer than an hour. Here are some salient points from our conversation.

Sara Marberry: What made you make the switch from working in an architectural/engineering firm to working in a healthcare organization?