After eight months of refining and evolving concept statements first submitted in March, four teams took to the Zoom stage during November’s HCD Virtual event to present the final iterations of their submissions to Healthcare Design’s Breaking Through conceptual design competition.

Charged with solving a challenge anticipated in the future of care delivery—and forgetting traditional restrictions to innovation like codes, budgets, and schedules—the teams representing HGA, SmithGroup, Perkins Eastman, and HDR each offered 10-minute, visually rich presentations detailing their concepts for the keynote session audience. At the conclusion, attendees voted via a poll to choose the winner of the $10,000 grand prize. That winner was the HGA team with its concept, Farm to Pharm.

Below, you’ll find links to articles detailing each of those concepts. On those pages, we’re also including several images from the submissions as well as the videos presented at HCD Virtual. We hope you find their work inspiring. Congratulations to HGA, and to all of our finalists!

WINNER: Farm to Pharm, submitted by HGA

FINALIST: Fare2Care, submitted by SmithGroup

FINALIST: G.I.S.M.O. (Guidance for the Impaired Sensory Monitor and Operator), submitted by Perkins Eastman

FINALIST: Bubbles of Hope, submitted by HDR

Many thanks also go out to our jury members for their time and commitment to this program.

2020 Breaking Through Jury

  • Hank Adams, Global Director of Health, HDR
  • David Allison, Director of Graduate Studies in Architecture + Health, Clemson University
  • Sheila F. Cahnman, President, JumpGarden Consulting LLC
  • Chris Connell, Chief Design Officer, Cleveland Clinic
  • David Grandy, Vice President, Office of Transformation, Kaiser Permanente
  • Suzen L. Heeley, Executive Director, Design+Construction, Memorial Sloan
    Kettering Cancer Center
  • Jean Mah, Principal, Board of Directors, Healthcare Practice Leader, Perkins&Will
  • John Maher, Senior Associate, MASS Design Group
  • Kevin B. Mahoney, Chief Executive Officer, University of Pennsylvania Health System
  • Scott Nelson, System Vice President, Planning, Design & Construction, Advocate Aurora Health
  • Lionel Ohayon, Founder & CEO, ICrave
  • Kim E. Shinn, Principal/Senior Sustainability Wizard, TLC Engineering for Architecture
  • Gary Vance, President, Vance Consulting

The Judging Process: Initial proposals were submitted in March and included a concept statement, outline of the specific challenge that the concept solves, and an overview of its innovative design elements. The 54 submissions were divided between two groups of jurors in a blind judging; jurors were not given projects associated with their own organizations. Of those Phase 1 submissions, 18 were chosen by the jury to advance to Phase 2, during which detail-rich presentations were submitted that included graphics to support the conceptual design. Jurors affiliated with the firms that made it to this round of judging were recused from the process. During the July judging, four finalists were chosen to present their ideas live during a keynote session at HCD Virtual in November. After viewing the four presentations, attendees voted for their favorite via a Zoom poll to choose the $10,000 grand prize winner.