The Decaf Hospital Concept a Finalist in HCD 2024 Breaking Through Competition

The Decaf Hospital, a model for addressing the interconnected challenges of cost, equity, access and quality of care in the context of climate change, developed by a team at SmithGroup, has been named a finalist in Healthcare Design magazine’s 2024 Breaking Through conceptual design competition.  

The Breaking Through competition encourages design innovation by asking teams to develop their most imaginative and inspiring concepts to solve the challenges anticipated in the future delivery of care, without the typical restricting constraints of budget, schedule, codes, etc.  

This year marks HCD’s fourth installment of the competition. In its previous installments, SmithGroup has been recognized as a second-round participant in the inaugural 2018 competition and the firm’s Fare2Care concept was awarded second place in 2020. In the 2022 program, SmithGroup’s MediDesis concept was recognized as a semifinalist. 

The members of the SmithGroup team for The Decaf Hospital concept are Neil Abrams, Nuti Dave, Farimah Raisali, Cassidy Roberts, Nate Savage, and Siqi Zhu, supported by visualization and graphics specialists Vince Jaramillo, Virginia Rice, and Abby Teibel and advisors Wayne Barger, Erin McNamara, Y Pham, and Karthik Ramadurai. 

Finalists will present their concepts in a keynote session at the October 2024 HCD Conference + Expo in Indianapolis. Audience members will choose the winner and that team will receive $10,000. The winner will be revealed in the December issue of Healthcare Design magazine, with features of all finalists.