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Status Report:

An Investigation To Determine Whether the Built Environment Affects Patient's Medical Outcomes
Haya R. Rubin, M.D., Ph.D., Amanda J. Owens, J.D., Greta Golden, B.A. with an introduction by David O. Weber
44 pages, with illustrations
The Center for Health Design, 1998

Executive Summary

Wise use of healthcare resources to improve patient health and well-being, promote efficiency, reduce employee turnover, and avoid wasteful spending dictates a careful examination of the ways in which such an encompassing factor as the built environment can affect patients' health outcomes. If it is, in fact, an important contributor to healthcare effectiveness, it is easily manipulated. Without knowing which, if any, aspects of the physical setting make a difference, however, health facility design decisions will continue to be made on the basis of untested propositions. Money could be saved and a greater payback realized if design decisions were grounded in scientifically valid information.

These were the premises upon which The Center for Health Design contracted in September 1995 with The Johns Hopkins Program for Medical Technology and Practice Assessment (PMTPA) to develop a concept paper for a research master plan that would address whether and in what ways patients' clinical outcomes might be improved through designed elements of the healthcare environment. Three tasks were included in the contract: (1) to review the literature to find out what is known about the effect of the healthcare environmental design on patient health outcomes, (2) to suggest design applications based on selected findings in the literature, and (3) based on the literature review, to make initial recommendations for developing a research agenda in this area for the next ten or more years.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Preface
The State of Our Knowledge
A Model: Environment and Outcomes
Toward a Research Agenda
Appendix A: Literature Search/Methods
Appendix B: Summary Table of Extant Studies of the Effects of the Healthcare Environment on Patient
Appendix C: Proposed Research
Plan Timetable

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