Where Does the Built Environment Fit In?
Unless you’ve been living under a log, you know that the Obama Administration has put a priority on creating a better healthcare system so that every American has access to high quality healthcare. They want to do this by the end of the year.
Ambitious, yes, but not impossible. Here are the three key componente of the Obama healthcare reform agenda:
1. Reform the healthcare system: We will take steps to reform our system by expanding coverage, improving quality, lowering costs, honoring patient choice and holding insurance companies accountable.
2. Promote scientific and technological advancements: We are committed to putting responsible science and technological innovation ahead of ideology when it comes to medical research. We believe in the enormous capacity of American ingenuity to find cures for diseases that continue to extinguish too many lives and cause too much suffering every year.
3. Improve preventative care: In order to keep our people healthy and provide more efficient treatment we need to promote smart preventative care, like cancer screenings and better nutrition, and make critical investments in electronic health records, technology that can reduce errors while ensuring privacy and saving lives.
Where does the design of the built environment fit in to all this? Very simple — improving quality, lowering costs, reducing errors, and saving lives. We know that by making changes to the built environment and operations, we can create safer more sustainable facilities that can impact all those areas — and have the evidence to prove it.
So, we need to get our voice heard in Congress. The Center for Health Design is working with others in the industry to try to make this happen and hope to share more about our progress soon. I’ll keep you posted.