Insights & Solutions

Built environment strategies can help healthcare organizations and communities promote healthy living, reduce obesity, and prevent chronic disease. Given the increasing focus on community health and preventive medicine, it is important that healthcare organizations and the communities they serve incorporate built environment strategies that result in healthy behavior.

With support from the Kresge Foundation, The Center for Health Design has developed a standardized Community Health Center Facility Evaluation tool that supports design for population health. The tool is intended to support both design and post-occupancy evaluation of built projects with respect to population health goals.

This tool is meant to support a universal design approach to environments for aging populations. 

Gunn, R., Davis, M. M., Hall, J., Heintzman, J., Muench, J., Smeds, B., ... & Brown, J. (2015). Designing clinical space for the delivery of integrated behavioral health and primary care. The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, 28(Supplement 1), S52-S62.

This Ambulatory Care Center Design Tool (ACCDT), developed by Dr. Anjali Joseph and Dr. Zahra Zamani from Clemson University in collaboration with The Center for Health Design (CHD), builds upon a series of papers, best practice case studies and in-depth literature reviews conducted by CHD as well as CHD's Clinic Design Post-Occupancy Evaluation Toolkit – Tool 2 Audit of Physical Environment with additions from a thesis by Crews (2013). The tool supports design teams in making key design decisions about ambulatory care centers linked to evidence based design goals and principles.

The goal for this project was to establish the first separately licensed children’s hospital in the community of El Paso, Texas with an interior environment that is patient-centered, family focused, community accessible, culturally compatible and a magnet for the recruitment of pediatric medical staff.  

The goal for this project was to integrate a comprehensive art program into Fort Belvoir Community Hospital’s sophisticated way-finding system, designed to serve patients, family, and staff.

The goal for this project: to have the family-focused program at this case study site was to design and improve safety and quality to meet the specific needs of patients, their families, and staff.

The goal for this project was to change a patient’s hospital experience through specific environmental design features aimed at reducing stress.

The goal for this project was to change the art program from an art-for-art’s sake to an evidence-based approach that uses research to determine appropriate art for patients and staff and collects evidence on the effectiveness of the art-intervention implemented.

When you think of your communication goals, they’re probably focused on promoting your healthcare organization broadly within your community. Of course this is an essential ingredient in attracting highly qualified staff and building patient volume. But did you know that it’s also just as important—if not more so—to develop an internal communication strategy?