As part of the 2018 Healthcare Design Expo & Conference, Healthcare Design introduced its new conceptual design competition, Breaking Through, which challenged industry members to forget the usual rules and restrictions of healthcare design to answer the challenges they anticipate for the future of healthcare delivery. Unencumbered by codes, budgets, schedules, and so on, 43 teams ultimately submitted innovative design concepts.

An elite jury of industry professionals selected two of those concepts to move on to the next stage of the competition—which was held live during the keynote presentation, “Breaking Through: The Future of Healthcare Design,” on Tuesday, Nov. 12, at the HCD Expo in Phoenix.

Those finalists included AECOM and its project, “Hello Care: Personalized Healthcare, Same-day Delivery,” a modular healthcare space that could support diagnostic and interventional procedures, sub-acute or transitional care, and wellness support, and HDR’s project, “MASH: Mobile Acute Services Hospital,” which sought to address the rising need for disaster care around the world, with a modular air-based mobile unit that can be deployed to locations to deliver a variety of levels of care.

Each team gave a 10-minute live presentation during the keynote and then afterwards, session attendees voted for the concept they found most innovative via a live polling app, naming the HDR team as the winner and recipient of the $10,000 prize.

During an onstage discussion about the final presentations, juror Jodie Lesh with Kaiser Permanente noted that she appreciated the project team taking on the issue of disaster relief and looking beyond the barriers of these situations to design a solution.

Juror Gary Vance of Vance Consulting lauded both finalists for providing ideas that were scalable, flexible, and mobile. “That’s what our healthcare has to be,” he says.

Additional coverage of the winner and runner-up will appear in the December issue of Healthcare Design magazine and on HCDmagazine.com in December.