Steelcase Health Wins Third Nightingale Award for Pocket Mobile Workstations

Steelcase Health also announces new Collegiate Student Healthcare Design Competition

Las Vegas – November 17, 2010 – Steelcase Health, a leading manufacturer of furniture for healthcare environments, has earned its third prestigious Nightingale Award at the annual Healthcare Design 2010 Conference for its new mobile workstation solution, Pocket.

Pocket is designed to support the active work of healthcare professionals by accommodating both the demands of the task at hand as well as supportive technology and was developed in collaboration with Modo Inc.

Steelcase Health’s Director of Product Design, Alan Rheault said, “We felt that a new solution to support active healthcare work needed to focus on the most basic needs. It’s great that the judges appreciated the product we strived to make, refined, simple and iconic.”

Healthcare in Motion

Healthcare work happens anywhere and everywhere today. Healthcare professionals ARE mobile workers.

Technology such as the Electronic Medical Record (EMR), has emerged as a critical element of virtually every healthcare function, but technology hardware and software are changing rapidly. To support healthcare work — both the technology and how it is supported needs to be “in motion.”

Pocket mobile workstations provide an opportunity to bring together work and the use of technology as a tool: to communicate with a patient, to collaborate with coworkers or to perform personal, focused work.

Pocket focuses on three key design principles:

  1. Less is more – A small footprint to fit into the real world of healthcare; only the most essential features, creating low cost high value; zero noise (really) and less effort to roll with the best wheels in the industry.
  2. Accommodate changing technology – Pocket easily handles a wide variety of technology — lap tops, tablets, monitors, CPU’s, all-in-ones — even pen and paper.
  3. People do things differently… let them – Moveable magnetic accessories allow for quick user configuration; Flexibility – non-prescribed surfaces and light storage ready to be transformed to the work process of the user

Steelcase Health’s Third Nightingale Award

The 2010 Nightingale Awards honor new healthcare products introduced to the U.S. market since November 2009.

They are awarded based on the product’s contribution to the quality of healthcare, functionality, quality, aesthetics, environmental sustainability and pricing, and are judged by interior designers and architects that specialize in healthcare design.

The Nightingale Awards product design competition is sponsored by Contract magazine in association with The Center for Health Design and The Healthcare Design Conference.
“Healthcare outcomes can be improved for patients and families and those people that provide care in North America and worldwide,” said Kyle Williams, Steelcase Health’s General Manager.

“We have a great deal of research and insight going into developing a variety of new solutions addressing significant problems — not only around new technologies, but new types of spaces and environments. Earning a Nightingale Award is a tremendous honor for Steelcase Health and reinforces our commitment to research-based solutions and our effort to continuously strive to offer the highest quality products.”

This is the third Nightingale Award for Steelcase Health, with the company’s Opus Overbed Table and SYNC centralized and decentralized workstations as previous award winners.

New Student Design Competition Announced

Also at this year’s Healthcare Design Conference, Steelcase Health announced the establishment of the “Steelcase Health Collegiate Healthcare Design Competition” in collaboration with Vendome Group (publishers of Healthcare Design Magazine) and The Center for Health Design.

“This is a unique opportunity for college students to participate in a conceptual healthcare design competition, said Libby Ferin, Steelcase Health’s Director of Experience Marketing. “Students will research the current challenges within a selected healthcare environment, determine opportunities for improvement, share their thought processes and prepare presentations demonstrating creative ways for improvement.” For more information on the competition, log here.

About Steelcase Health

Steelcase Health by Steelcase is a company focused on healthcare environments and how products within these environments can help make them more comfortable, efficient and conducive to the healing process. For more information, visit Health.

Contact

Michael Pflughoeft
MAP Communications
262-389-0270
mapcomms@wi.rr.com