The healthcare architect
Stefanie Vonhoff chuckles as she recalls the mountains of paperwork that filled the offices of her earlier architectural firms. Dusty sketch rolls cluttered every corner and the drawers were overflowing. That was before she joined Siemens Healthineers as an architect 16 years ago. For Stefanie Vonhoff, a mother of four raising her two youngest children on her own, a career change marked a venture into the unknown terrain of hospital planning — one of the "supreme disciplines" of architecture in terms of complexity. Ever since, Vonhoff has been planning a wide variety of hospital wards with her colleagues in the Facility Design & Planning Services department, which is part of the Enterprise Services unit. She is now team lead of the Partnership Projects group. The 65-strong multidisciplinary team that makes up the Facility Design & Planning Services department includes architects, technology planners, 3D experts, CAD engineers, and software developers. Efficiency plays a major role both in my architectural planning and in my private life. As a single mother, I have to be very structured to make sure I can keep all the plates spinning. Stefanie Vonhoff, Architect, Facility Design & Planning Services Everything is digital and efficient "What I love about my job is the diversity of people and professional groups I get to work with. And also that everything here is digital and efficient," says Vonhoff. As she speaks, she surveys a large number of colored digital boxes on her computer screen. This is a project management tool developed in-house at Siemens Healthineers. With it, she can see the status of ongoing customer projects around the globe. The Facility Design & Planning Services team executes some 8,000 planning projects in around 80 different countries every year. From her computer, Vonhoff designs layouts for more or less anything conceivable in the clinical sector: radiology, cardiology, and nuclear medicine departments, therapy centers, emergency departments, and much more. Sometimes entirely new buildings are needed, and sometimes the task is to modernize or expand existing facilities. Vonhoff acquired the necessary specialized knowledge of medical technology step by step. “And I learn something new every day,” she says with a laugh.
