How HOK Is Influencing the Future of Pediatric Healthcare Design

HOK’s Pediatric Center of Expertise leaders Karen Freeman and Laura Poltronieri discuss the trends and challenges influencing healthcare design for children.

Last year, HOK launched its Pediatric Center of Expertise to address the unique challenges in designing spaces for children’s health. Karen Freeman and Laura Poltronieri lead the initiative, building on more than 60 years of combined experience designing healthcare spaces for children. As the Center of Expertise enters its second full year of operation, the leaders reflect on how pediatric healthcare design is evolving and what lies ahead.

Specialized Expertise for Specialized Spaces

“Designing for children’s health is about investing in the future,” said Freeman. “It requires creating spaces that support safety, healing, and childhood development while addressing the physical and psychological needs of pediatric patients—where children can be children.”

Pediatric healthcare is also highly specialized, said Poltronieri. “Once you explore the clinical differences between children and adult healthcare needs and services, you begin to see the myriad of issues that require specialized expertise.”

Dedicated leadership and expertise allow Freeman, Poltronieri and their team to provide proven, informed solutions that address client challenges and industry demands.

“With today’s emphasis on speed-to-market, clients want design teams that specialize in pediatrics from the start,” said Poltronieri. “Our expertise empowers us to move quickly, eliminate inefficient solutions and effectively steward resources and project teams toward project success.”

Empathetic Design: Opportunity in Tailored Design

Children’s healthcare also requires a thoughtful and strategic approach to design. Pediatric environments must balance safety with sensitivity and consider the impact of the space on impressionable children.

Empathy drives the Center’s approach. “For patients and their families, a hospital visit can be a frightening and uncertain time. For caregivers, who have committed themselves to providing compassionate, life-saving care, the work can be taxing,” noted Freeman.

Beyond providing critical care, pediatric health settings must serve a variety of functions, such as preserving creativity and play for children, offering comfort and care for their families, maintaining functionality and support for caregivers, and being intuitive to navigate for all users.

Project Spotlight: Expertise at Work

HOK’s work on La Rabida Children’s Hospital in Chicago offers an example of the Center’s partnership with clients in reimagining pediatric care in delivery and design. The hospital came to HOK to help identify future treatment trends in pediatric rehab delivery and conceptualize new services. HOK developed a series of patient avatars that allowed the clinicians to better “see” a variety of future patient perspectives and make informed decisions for operational strategies and facility design.

The avatar exercise uncovered new insights that allowed the hospital to anticipate and better prepare for shifts in therapy delivery. By providing a structured, yet imaginative framework, the team was able to better align physical spaces with La Rabida’s long-term vision for patient care, creating a more adaptive and impactful environment that elevated both the design process and user experience.

Powering The Next Era of Pediatric Care

HOK’s Pediatric Center of Expertise is focused on not just enhancing pediatric design for our clients, but providing industry-wide solutions that address the most challenging needs of patients, such as mental health care and support.

At Kedren Children’s Village, a comprehensive inpatient and outpatient behavioral health facility in South Los Angeles, the team designed spaces that respond to a long-overdue demand for pediatric mental health services. This includes providing spaces for psychiatric inpatient, outpatient and urgent care, transitional housing and primary care. The result is a therapeutic and healing environment that addresses the whole health and tailored needs of pediatric mental health patients.

Freeman and Poltronieri see Kedren Children’s Village as a model for pediatric care that prioritizes total wellness and mental health for children from disenfranchised communities.

A Broader Impact

Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, HOK’s Pediatric Center of Expertise is excited to see new projects, like the Gayle and Tom Benson Ochsner Children’s Hospital in New Orleans, come online and serve as examples of excellence in pediatric healthcare. The team is also excited to continue its work collaborating with industry partners and pushing the envelope of design that nurtures the health and wellbeing of children and creates stronger, more resilient communities.