Managing acute care.

In the last few years, much medical-facility construction has been driven by what insurers want. Hospitals have built facilities for well-reimbursed procedures and closed money-losing ones. Health-maintenance organizations increasingly expect to hold down costs by making prepayment arrangements with doctors and their hospitals. President Clinton has pledged early action on health-care reform, which will likely change planners' priorities. Whether the nation goes to Clintonian "managed competition" or a Canadian-style nationwide single-payer system (the two most likely options), the projects on these pages reflect two large-scale trends that are likely to continue: the movement of more procedures from inpatient to outpatient facilities and the separation of treatment functions from ordinary office and administrative tasks so that the latter are not performed in the same high-cost buildings as technology-intensive procedures. Various schemes that make care more "patient-centered" have been tried and been shown to speed healing, even for outpatients, but such hard-to-quantify issues get short shrift in an era of knee-jerk cost containment. The challenge in tomorrow's healthcare universe--whatever it becomes--will be to keep these issues on the table.