People
Susan O’Hara PhD, MPH, BA, RN, EDAC, FNIHD, FNAP
Clinical Innovations Leader, Research & Evidence Based Design
Susan O’Hara PhD, MPH, BA, RN, EDAC, FNIHD, FNAP
Clinical Innovations Leader, Research & Evidence Based Design
Susan O’Hara is the Clinical Innovations Leader in NBBJ’s Healthcare Consulting studio, focused on growing the research, clinical innovation and evidence-based practices at NBBJ.
Susan brings more than 40 years of experience as a Registered Nurse, educator and researcher with a focus on public health and how systems support maintaining wellness and providing care. She has worked with organizations and institutions including Boston Children’s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Massachusetts; the University of Connecticut; The Ohio State University College of Nursing, where she served as Assistant Professor, and Clemson University in South Carolina, where she developed a graduate certificate program with the School of Architecture and the School of Nursing titled, “Leadership and Innovation in Health and Design.” She also helped to establish the Academy of Nursing Excellence in Design during her post-doctoral appointment at Clemson University.
Susan founded O’Hara HealthCare Consultants, LLC, a healthcare consultancy specializing in architectural healthcare programming design. Through her consultancy and as an academic, she has worked on over 30 healthcare and computer simulation projects for healthcare organizations including Kaiser Permanente, Ascension Health and Johns Hopkins Hospital, and has conducted extensive research with architects to design more efficient, staff-appropriate and patient/family-appropriate healthcare spaces. Most recently, her research focus incorporates human factors engineering, and specifically macrocognition, as a theoretical framework.
Susan has presented at numerous conferences on the intersection of healthcare, architecture and computer simulation modeling, and her work has been published in peer-reviewed, award-winning journals including the Health Environments Research & Design Journal (HERD), Oxford University Press, Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing and the Journal of Professional Nursing.