Beth Radovanovich Joins HMC Architects as Healthcare Practice Leader and Director of Healthcare...

Beth Swenson Radovanovich, AIA, recently joined HMC Architects as healthcare practice leader and director of healthcare planning. In this newly created position, her role is to enhance the firm's existing healthcare practice by changing the manner by which it approaches healthcare design. Prior to this recent appointment, Radovanovich worked closely with Sutter Health System to develop new process paradigms that transform patient care delivery methods.

An architect with more than 25 years of experience, Radovanovich has devoted her entire career to healthcare architecture, providing planning and design services for prominent healthcare facilities across the country, including Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Mass.; Rush Copley Medical Center in Aurora, Ill.; Denver Health Medical Center in Colo.; and Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento, in Sacramento, Calif.

In her new role with HMC Architects, Radovanovich's task is to bring the firm closer to its growing numbers of healthcare clients and to help HMC Architects produce "thought leading" hospital designs that promote patient healing, as well as hospital efficiency.

"My passion is with the front-end planning before you actually get to the architecture," Radovanovich said. "We are currently reviewing the process of what actually occurs in a hospital and how we can make hospitals not only more efficient, but more supportive of the patient and staff experience. Architecture should really support the process of care delivery and healing. If we as architects can articulate a thorough understanding of the operational processes, then the architecture becomes the supportive foundation for transforming the way healthcare is provided."

Radovanovich plans to staff her division with clinical practitioners who can help HMC Architects better understand how to reconcile the care delivery processes with designs that address the needs of the patient, family, and caregivers. "We architects speak a different language than medical practitioners," Radovanovich said. "By having a clinical staff on board, he or she can become a translator for us, and ultimately an advocate for the end user."