Inside a 20,000-square-foot wing of SSM Health St. Anthony Hospital, nurses, cardiologists and architects have spent recent weeks pushing a stretcher through hallways made entirely of cardboard, testing whether a heart attack patient could move fast enough through a floor plan that does not yet exist in brick and steel. The full-scale mockup, built at the Oklahoma City hospital, is standing in for a redesigned cardiology floor that will eventually move the catheterization lab and interventional radiology suite out of separate floors and into adjoining rooms.
The exercise, first reported by The Journal Record, included a simulated heart attack response run through the cardboard corridors on August 10, with staff physically moving a stretcher through the mocked-up space to see where the new layout might slow them down. Architect Miller is handling the cardiology floor architecture project, according to the same report, while Scott Parker said the cardboard approach lets the team catch problems that blueprints and renderings tend to miss. Parker said the goal is to minimize the minutes it takes to get patients into procedures.
Why the Layout Change Matters for Heart Attack Patients
The reasoning behind moving the cath lab and interventional radiology into adjoining rooms traces back to a clinical benchmark that has guided emergency cardiac care for two decades. Under guidelines established by the American Heart Association, emergency teams aim for a door-to-balloon time of 90 minutes or less to clear arterial blockages during acute heart attacks, and cutting the physical distance a patient travels inside the hospital is one of the more direct ways to protect that window. Interventional cardiologist Vinodh Jeevanantham, who is involved in the project, said the layout change should make staff coordination easier during the complex emergencies that require several departments to respond at once, though he noted those particular cases only happen a few times a year given the nature of the disease.
Jeevanantham also framed the redesign as part of a bigger shift in how heart disease will be treated going forward, saying the future of medicine will look like a continuous spectrum rather than separate cardiology and vascular fields. Per the Journal Record’s reporting, the future cardiology floor is expected to feature fewer open-heart surgeries and more minimally invasive procedures, with closer integration across specialties. That vision lines up with a broader national pattern: as reported by Diagnostic and Interventional Cardiology, hospitals nationwide are increasingly building hybrid procedural spaces that unite catheterization, interventional radiology and vascular surgery into adjacent rooms rather than scattering them across floors.
A Cheap Way to Avoid Expensive Mistakes
Building a hospital floor out of cardboard before pouring a single foundation might look unusual, but it reflects an evidence-based method gaining traction across the industry. A study published in PubMed Central in November 2024 found that full-scale cardboard mockups and clinical simulations helped participating health systems avoid up to $90 million in post-construction renovation and operational changes. The logic is straightforward: letting doctors and nurses physically walk through a space before it is built lets them catch dimension and workflow problems while the walls still cost nothing to move…