OR 360, a project conducted jointly by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the U.S. military, aims to streamline and improve trauma care in the crucial first hour of emergency medical treatment by reconfiguring the surgical suite.

Working with CannonDesign, the team turned one floor of a three-story, 26,000-square-foot building built in 1984 into a simulation suite to test design ideas for a futuristic operating room and new trauma processes.

The OR 360 research team is interdisciplinary with physicians from Cedars-Sinai and military hospitals as well as researchers from several universities in such diverse areas as psychology, aviation, and human-factors research.

It was important that the group’s new space in Los Angeles encourage researchers to talk to each other, both formally and informally. The design achieves this through an open environment that includes academic offices, collaborative shared spaces, flexible research areas, and some private offices. Congregation areas are also designed to facilitate collegial interactions and collaborative activities.

To re-engineer the operating room, the team needed a simulation OR suite that would facilitate a real-time, iterative, collaborative, and spontaneous process of three-dimensional design. The design team drew upon techniques of theater design, creating a place that could be reconfigured by the clinicians and researchers without having to call a building contractor.

All ceiling equipment is moveable with equipment attached to a custom-made ceiling trolley system on tracks that allows pieces to pivot around surgical teams.  The suite walls are both moveable and demountable.

For more design details, check out the photos and captions.

For more on the simulation OR, read “Reinventing The Simulation Center OR” and check out HCD’s May/June issue.