As India’s hospitals race to keep pace with rising patient expectations, tighter regulations and the push for greener, tech-enabled infrastructure, few names have been as synonymous with healthcare design and planning as HOSMAC. From compact primary health centres to large multi-speciality campuses, the 150‑plus–member team of doctors, architects, engineers and hospital administrators has spent nearly three decades turning complex clinical, operational and regulatory demands into humane, efficient and future‑ready spaces. In this conversation, Ar. Mihir Desai, Director at HOSMAC, discusses how the firm is reimagining hospital environments to feel more like home, embedding biophilic and sustainable design, and using smart technologies and modular layouts to support patient recovery, staff productivity and long-term resilience.
1) How does a home-like atmosphere in a hospital impact patient recovery, well-being, and overall experience?
A home-like atmosphere in a hospital significantly improves patient recovery, well-being, and experience by prioritising patient-centered design principles. This approach focuses on fostering better interactions among patients, visitors, and staff, which directly correlates with a higher quality of recovery. By incorporating elements like soft colour palettes and biophilic features (such as trees and views of nature) to create a less clinical, more comforting space, hospitals address patients' social and natural needs, generating a homely feeling that reduces stress and anxiety. Furthermore, thoughtful anthropometric design ensures accessibility and handy access to necessary features, promoting patient independence and dignity throughout their stay.
2) How do you balance investment in advanced technology, sustainable materials, and patient-centric design while managing overall project costs?
Achieving the optimal balance between investing in cutting-edge medical technology, integrating sustainable building materials, and ensuring a deeply patient-centric design—all within a defined project budget, is fundamentally managed through early and constant cross-disciplinary integration. At HOSMAC, our functioning deliberately pairs architects with financial modellers, clinicians, and equipment engineers from the onset. This synergy allows us to proactively pinpoint the true balance where high-impact, long-term value is created.
3) How does advanced wayfinding and location-based technology enhance patient and visitor experience in the hospitals that HOSMAC has constructed?
A hospital's circulatory design, leveraging well-lit public spaces for staircases, lifts, and fire escapes, fosters natural intuition by making these access nodes immediately legible, thus forming a reliable memory map for patients and visitors where signage acts as a helpful reinforcement. This physical clarity is powerfully enhanced by Location-Based Services (LBS), which, when integrated with indoor surveying, enables remote sensing of patients, ensuring seamless, real-time guidance and asset tracking across specialty departments, thereby transforming the experience from a confusing search into a confident, supported journey.
4) How are your hospital layouts evolving to support flexibility, modularity, and future growth?
At HOSMAC, the evolution of healthcare space design increasingly relies on a collaborative approach, merging the deep knowledge of experienced professionals with the fresh perspectives of budding architects and creative interior designers, all while critically integrating the latest technology to ensure that the final environments are cutting-edge, serving the needs of contemporary patient care and reflecting the most up-to-date standards held by architects, interior designers, and specialized healthcare designers. Our team is also involved in industry relevant knowledge exchange forums such as Hospital Engineering Summit (HES), resulting in exchange of new and coming design practices and ideas, bringing a breath of fresh air to all our design and projects.
5) How do you ensure that your hospital design actively supports patient care, recovery, and staff efficiency?
Biophilic design is a crucial component in modern healthcare architecture, actively supporting patient recovery by creating environments that mimic or connect to nature. This connection helps to reduce patient stress, which in turn can accelerate healing and induce the desire to go out, encouraging mobility and a sense of normalcy. Design elements such as providing Inpatient Department (IPD) rooms with windows offering outdoor views to creating pathways with comfort and safety in mind; all work to leverage nature's therapeutic effects. Simultaneously, the integration of greenery and outdoor areas significantly boosts staff efficiency and morale; dedicated sit-outs, gardens, and pockets of green with comfortable furniture provide clinicians and support staff with restorative break areas.
6) Can you explain the benefits of integrating natural light, greenery, and eco-friendly design elements into a hospital?
Modern hospitals have a dedicated concern for incorporating greenery in their designs. Green Hospital elements like integrated greenery and natural features aim to create a beneficial microclimate and offer restorative public spaces inside the building, which collectively improve environmental interactions, reduce stress, and facilitate faster patient recovery. Moreover, hospitals aren’t just clinical centres, they are social institutions too. This integration encourages the interaction between humans and nature more & more on a regular basis.
7) How is advanced technology, including IoT, AI, and smart hospital systems, shaping patient care and operations in hospitals?
From a building management perspective, integrating technology like IoT enables users to locate and measure various built environment characteristics, such as temperature control and access control, while sensors on doors and windows provide seamless connectivity and help reduce infection by avoiding touch surfaces. Looking towards the future, this foundation will allow for general medical consultations to potentially occur entirely through Telemedicine and AI chatbots once patient vitals are captured by integrated scanners, sensors, and cameras within the built systems.
8) Can you share examples of design innovations in your hospital projects that have directly improved patient experience, operational efficiency, or staff productivity?
In recent hospital projects like Madhav Netralaya Eye Hospital & Research Centre, a design innovation involves advocating for the strategic use of glass, specifically transparent, translucent, and opaque types in interior spaces. This choice directly enhances the provider experience by allowing clear visibility of patients at various junctions, particularly in areas like the OPD, which in turn improves surveillance by clinical staff while still allowing spaces to be appropriately segregated.
9) How does your hospital design support emergency preparedness and safety management in high patient influx scenarios?
Hospital design for emergency preparedness prioritizes efficient healthcare planning over maximizing real estate value, recognizing that emergencies expand beyond initial projections. Key to this is a judiciously planned Emergency Unit featuring separate access points for general emergency entry and dedicated roads for ambulance services to manage poly-trauma cases arriving via multiple vehicles without creating gridlock.
10) Considering India’s diverse climates, how do you adapt material choices and design strategies to ensure comfort, efficiency, and durability across hospitals?
Our approach to hospital construction prioritizes natural, low-impact, and thermally efficient materials to ensure a sustainable and comfortable environment. We select materials that possess low heat absorption qualities and are often light-colored, such as using china mosaic waterproofing on terraces to reflect heat and provide long-term protection. We incorporate Double Glazed Units (DGU) to minimize noise and improve thermal efficiency. Durability is matched with environmental responsibility by utilizing recycled materials and those that are easily recyclable, while actively avoiding materials like high-gypsum products and plastics. Furthermore, we employ external design strategies, like planting trees in the periphery and using porous paved concrete/tiles, to mitigate noise and manage surface runoff. Moreover, locally sourced materials also help in cutting transportation costs and lowers carbon emissions as well.
