By Kirk Rose AIA, DBIA / Principal, Healthcare Practice Leader

“The new Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital doesn’t open until June, but that’s hard to tell with all the people darting in and out of buildings at the South Los Angeles medical facility.

On a recent morning, a doctor crosses the 42-acre campus with a briefcase slung over his shoulder. A patient with a cane hobbles down a path. People in scrubs grab food from a taco truck.

“This place has a heartbeat,” says Dr. Mark Ghaly, deputy director for community health and integrated programs for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. “The heartbeat is not the hospital.”

The focus of medical care, Ghaly argues, has shifted away from hospitals.

And with its emphasis on preventive treatments, with its new urgent-care center and outpatient and public health clinics, the new MLK campus, he says, provides a state-of-the-art answer to the question: How do you build a hospital in 2015?”

>>Read the full LA Times article here