When cruise ships are being built, the cabins are just slotted in as prefabricated modules – it's faster and easier than building each one from scratch, within the ship. Well, Philadelphia-based EIR Healthcare is taking the same approach to hospital-building, with its MedModular prefab patient rooms.
Being manufactured by real estate development company Admares, each MedModular room is delivered to the construction site 90 percent complete, including all the electrical wiring. The idea is that multiple units can simply be put together Lego-style, in order to get the hospital built quickly.
Among the rooms' features are automatic sliding doors, which should make entry and exit easier, and eliminate the need to touch the doors with one's germy hands. There are also "smart" windows that can electronically transition from transparent to opaque either at the press of a bedside button, or on a programmed day/night schedule that supports patients' circadian rhythms.
Other features include a built-in daybed for visitors, and the use of bacteria-resistant solid surface materials throughout, including a continuous solid-surface floor that doesn't have any seams where bacteria can grow. Additionally, each room has a Luminous SkyCeiling over the bed, which simulates a blue sky and is claimed to "yield meaningful therapeutic benefits for mind and body."
According to EIR Healthcare, the MedModular system should be competitive with traditional construction techniques on a price-per-square-foot basis, and allow hospitals to be completed up to 40 percent sooner.
Source: EIR Healthcare
Imagine building low/mid income housing (even whole cities/towns) quickly like Lego!
Each unit could be used in a building (of any size) or individually!
There could be different kinds of standard units for purposes other than housing, also (like office, shop etc.)!
Search Wikipedia for "Shipping container architecture"!
When's the last time you visited a friend in hospital? Did you go through a clean-room decontamination first? WTF? Why are we letting people visit AT ALL?
Antibiotics are not a substitute for prevention!!!
The ideal "hospital" is a tiny one that is mobile, so we are not concentrating all our sick and weak people into one dangerous place and helping to breed more unstoppable disease for them to spread and catch!!!!!
How this is any different from ANY hospital building? Any building has rooms, isn't that true? And, aren't those rooms even more tightly connected than rooms in any other building made of connected units? So if any building is really worse for hospital infections (and where is the proof/evidence for that claim exactly?) which would be worse really?
"When cruise ships are being built, the cabins are just slotted in as prefabricated modules"
Ability to easily/quickly replace is one of the main advantages of modular unit based building design.