Case study
Bisnow Chicago Healthcare Summit
At the Bisnow Chicago Healthcare Summit, leaders from real estate, healthcare and community development came together to reimagine the future of the healthcare landscape.
Invited to the main stage in 2024, Bija offered a fresh perspective—not as a developer or investor, but as a wellness strategist and advocate for the patient experience.
Reframing the future of healthcare through wellness and design
Bija challenged an audience of developers, builders and investors to envision and create built environments where people, patients—and even doctors—can truly thrive. Her call to action ignited a new conversation about design thinking in healthcare—one focused on how the built environment can elevate human well-being in every setting, from hospitals to community spaces.
The Opportunity
What began as a deeply personal experience—navigating a loved one’s hospitalization in a top-ranked medical center—became a catalyst for a larger realization: even the best clinical care can fall short when the environment undermines the human experience.
Motivated by that insight, Bija and her late father, legendary developer Marshall Bennett, began envisioning a new paradigm for wellness-integrated healthcare spaces. Together, they brought together a team of architects, hospitality leaders and health system executives to explore what became the emerging field of healthcare hospitality—a model designed to support healing through architecture, amenities and human-centered design.
The Work
Bija’s keynote at Bisnow was equal parts personal narrative, systems insight and strategic provocation. It invited an audience of developers, designers, health system leaders and investors to see wellness not just as an individual pursuit, but as something expressed through the spaces we build and the values those spaces embody.
Contributions included:
- Framing the connection between wellness and real estate while introducing the emerging field of healthcare hospitality
- Advocating cross-sector collaboration among investors, developers, architects, designers and physicians to rethink how environments support healing
- Calling for action to better align design with care delivery
Reach and Resonance
The Summit brought together hundreds of leaders from across the healthcare real estate ecosystem—including developers, system executives, brokers, designers and financiers. Rather than a keynote filled with technical data and projections, Bija’s talk stood out for its visionary clarity, bridging disciplines and helping the industry imagine new possibilities.
Through storytelling, strategy and systems insight, she invited leaders across sectors to rethink how the built environment can elevate care, foster connection and advance human well-being.
The healthcare hospitality concept first introduced in that presentation continues to gain traction. Today, BijaB is recognized as both a connector and strategist, linking the wellness and real estate sectors to advance a more human-centered approach to design and care.