The outpatient hospital: a hospital without beds

A radical reordering of the hospital building looms on the horizon. By the advent of the new millennium just a few years away, the outpatient hospital--a hospital without beds--will be the new healthcare model. The outpatient premise is that a wellness system is fundamentally different from a medical care system. The patient is no longer forced to distinguish between his ongoing health maintenance needs and his intermittent medical intervention needs. The barrier between the public health system and the acute care system disintegrates, and the two merge into one entity. Thus, hospitals evolve into outpatient wellness centers where the building's physical structure is a single entity in terms of service points.