Shaping the future of patient care with simulation
Based in Neuilly-sur-Seine in France, the American Hospital of Paris (AHP), has stood as a beacon of medical excellence and innovation for more than 120 years. Now, it’s building on that legacy with a bold modernization plan that will define the hospital’s next century.
The €100 million (US\\\$116 million) architectural transformation will see the hospital expand and redesign key areas, including its checkup center and operating rooms. The objective isn’t simply to build more space; it’s to create care environments that anticipate the real needs of patients and staff, enhance workflows, and support better outcomes.
In this new paradigm, room layout, patient flow, staff organization aren’t left to assumption. Everything from pathway organization, to the length of a hallway and ceiling-mounted equipment must be carefully considered for safety, efficiency and comfort. And that means simulating design concepts and patient flows, and involving clinical staff much earlier in the feedback process than traditional planning methods allow.
Solution
To bring its vision to life, AHP partnered with Dassault Systèmes and took advantage of its Virtual Twin as a Service approach through the Teleport 1/1 experience – a collaborative place that enabled the AHP teams to experiment their future workspace at a 1:1 scale, and assess their future care environments in terms of operations, workflow and spatial layouts. This gave the Hospital direct access to Dassault Systèmes’ advanced modeling and simulation capabilities for their project without having to skill up internally.
The initiative began with a consulting phase focused on the current checkup center. Dassault Systèmes’ team worked closely with clinicians and administrative staff to understand existing pain points, from disjointed patient flows to crowded waiting areas, so it could model and simulate future improvements.
Using architectural plans, building information modeling (BIM) data and supplier proposals, Dassault Systèmes used DELMIA to propose optimized scenarios and create detailed virtual twins of the checkup center, operating rooms and recovery areas, complete with all equipment. These virtual models were not just visual representations, they were realistic interactive environments that ran through typical hospital scenarios: patient check-ins during peak hours, emergency operating room transfers, and staff handovers. Flow simulations revealed how the hospital design would hold up under stress, how teams would move and collaborate, and where potential friction points might arise. Healthcare professionals could then explore these concepts using immersive virtual reality (VR) headsets. This multi-sensory experience aimed to engage them in a hands-on way and help to elevate knowledge and knowhow by bridging the gap between theory and practice.
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