Jan 28, 2025 _ news

GBBN Wins Touchstone Platinum Award

Our UC Health Medical Center Main Entrance Improvements project won the 2025 Touchstone Award Platinum Level, the highest honor awarded. Presented by the Center for Health Design, this prestigious award recognizes exceptional projects that integrate evidence-based design (EBD) principles in healthcare design. Our project demonstrated achievement across the three touchstones of the EBD process: Collaboration, Evaluation, and Sharing.

UC Health Medical Center saw an opportunity to enhance their patient experience by making changes to their main arrival entrance. A distinctive new entrance canopy clearly defines the campus’ front door, whether people are arriving on foot from the parking garage or driving up to the entrance.

The interior lobby and waiting areas were also transformed to create a strong, cohesive sense of place that is easy to navigate. In a post-occupancy evaluation (POE) study, findings validated successful design elements and identified areas for improvement. The POE led to the development of a robust protocol that assesses the arrival, orientation, and transition experiences of people in hospital arrival zones. This was done in collaboration with our research partners, Dr. Hui Cai and Dr. Monalipa Dash, from the University of Kansas.

“This was a very impressive study of the main hospital entry portal,” noted one juror. Jurors also commented that this project demonstrated a thorough and well-rounded approach to implementing the eight steps of the EBD process, and the methods used to conduct a critical review and interpretation of the literature was well documented.

For GBBN’s Director of Research, Dr. Shan Jiang, Ph.D, this recognition is further validation of our robust research program. “Receiving the Platinum Level of the Touchstone Award affirms GBBN’s expertise in hospital arrival design and highlights our commitment to setting the highest standards for EBD in healthcare design practices,” she says.

Many thanks to the Center for Health Design for this recognition and thanks to the project team: Kolar Design (environmental graphics); Heapy (MEP); THP Limited (structural engineering); REALM Collaborative (landscape architecture); The Lighting Practice (lighting); and The Kleingers Group (civil engineering).

We look forward to receiving our award in-person at the 2025 PDC Summit in Atlanta, Georgia in March.