Healthcare Design - September 2021 - 26

BUILDING PROFESSIONAL
WALT VERNON
CEO, Mazzetti; CEO, Sextant (San Francisco)
F
OR 29 YEARS, Walt Vernon has served
as CEO of Mazzetti, a mechanical,
electrical, and plumbing engineering
and technology consulting firm
specializing in healthcare. Throughout
his career, he's pushed to evolve and improve
the design of healthcare facilities, with
this past year presenting new opportunities
to contribute meaningfully. A highlight of that
effort was Vernon's role in the COVID-19 response,
during which he worked in concert
with the International Federation of Hospital
Engineering (IFHE) and Téchne, the World
Healthcare Organization's technical science
for health network, to staff the " international
help desk, " which provided healthcare facilities
around the world pro-bono consulting and
design services to help address the crisis. Vernon
and volunteers from Mazzetti recruited
19 design teams that ultimately completed 13
projects so far, including converting an existing
healthcare building for the care of COVID-19
patients in Burkina Faso and designing a prefabricated
screening facility in Haiti. He also
led the ASHRAE Position Document on Infectious
Aerosols, a work that disseminated evidence-based
advice for managing threats from
airborne pathogens in all types of buildings.
Additionally, Vernon saw the pandemic as an
opportunity to collect much-needed electrical
system data during healthcare surge events.
Despite the challenging time, he was able to
partner with seven hospitals in four states
to have meters installed for a year to provide
a better sense of electrical demand during a
worst-case scenario event. The goal is to use
the data to more accurately anticipate electrical
demand in design going forward to achieve
more sustainable and cost-eff ective operations.
In fact, sustainability and reducing the environmental
impact of healthcare facilities are
a longtime passion of Vernon's. In 2020 he coauthored
the National Academy of Medicine
26
SEP TEMBER 2021
scoping paper on how to reduce healthcare
carbon emissions over the next 10-30 years,
outlining specific recommendations pertaining
to health services delivery, infrastructure,
and fi nancing. Guided by the belief that greater
resiliency in healthcare is achieved by pursuing
sustainability simultaneously, Vernon is also
exploring the potential for the use of fuel cells
and microgrids in U.S. hospitals to increase
power resiliency while decreasing environmental
footprint.
WHAT DO YOU LOVE MOST ABOUT YOUR JOB?
Being able to fi nd new solutions to old challenges.
WHAT INDUSTRY CHALLENGE DO YOU HOPE
TO SOLVE?
I'm trying to help the industry de-carbonize, and
to show the rest of the world the public health imperative
for doing so.
WHAT'S THE NEXT MAJOR TREND YOU ANTICIPATE
FOR HEALTHCARE DESIGN?
True decarbonization ... We need to intentionally
design health service delivery to more aggressively
embrace the central importance of
carbon. This needs to come before we think
about material elements; health service delivery
is more fundamental.
WHAT DID YOU LEARN OVER THE PAST YEAR?
The power of inertia. Human beings are creatures
of habit in almost all aspects of existence.
As I try to create needed change, the resistance
to that change is usually in the form of mental
models rather than real change. For example, the
hamster in the cage-once the cage is removed, it
typically stays in the boundaries because it thinks
the cage is still there. We have similar mental
models. We have to fi gure out how to break mental
models and actually change.
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Healthcare Design - September 2021

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