Dr. Andrew Ibrahim
A surgeon and researcher, Ibrahim has spent the past decade studying medicine, health policy and design. Now as the first-ever chief medical officer for HOK’s Healthcare practice, he’s applying his knowledge of medicine and architecture to improve patient outcomes.
Before he discovered the field of medicine, Dr. Andrew Ibrahim, a resident surgeon at the University of Michigan, dreamed of being a designer. As a grade school student, Ibrahim would race through his homework only to turn the paper over and plan a city.
“I’d map where everything would go: the police station here, the commercial district there, residential neighborhoods over here,” recalls Ibrahim. “I loved thinking about how to co-locate the essential elements of a city so it would function optimally.”
When he was older, a new fascination took hold. With several of his family members dealing with health issues, Ibrahim became inspired by the doctors he’d meet on visits to hospitals and clinics. As an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ibrahim majored in pre-med and was preparing to enter the medical school a year early when he realized he hadn’t fully explored his childhood interest in design. He deferred entry to medical school so he could complete a year of foundation coursework in architecture and planning at The Bartlett School of Architecture in London.
“I came back to med school energized,” says Ibrahim. “My first naïve question was, ‘OK, who are the architects in the medical school who plan and design healthcare systems?’ Of course, there weren’t any. But I was told that if I was interested in healthcare delivery and design for communities and regions, I should understand the policies and funding that guide those decisions.”
So that’s what he did. As a Doris Duke Fellow during medical school, Ibrahim held joint appointments at Johns Hopkins University and the Institute of Medicine, allowing him to study the impact of the Affordable Care Act on care delivery. Later, as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Michigan, Ibrahim built on that work and published several policy evaluations on both the benefitsand unintended consequences of different care delivery models and used that information to begin redesigning alternative delivery models.
In recognition of his growing expertise at the intersection of health and architecture, the American Institute of Architects invited Ibrahim to join its Design & Health Leadership Group. In that role he met Paul Strohm, HOK’s director of healthcare. The two discovered they shared a lot of ideas about enhancing healthcare design. We’ll let Ibrahim explain a few of those concepts in his own words:
What caught my attention about HOK was this idea of designing hospitals that are more than just aesthetically beautiful. They need to function at a high level. That’s appealing to someone like me whose formal research training is in evaluating healthcare delivery and who is on the front line seeing patients. Having a chief medical officer within the firm resonated with my vision of how knowledge of health policy and firsthand clinical experience could inform better hospital design.