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.

In this webinar learn about the role of the FGI Guidelines in project design and development – What they are; who uses them; and why they are an important as a reference in project reviews, learn about the proposed change to the 2014 Guidelines – How your work will be affected and where to find the research/evidence to support “Access to Nature” in your next project, obtain an understanding of the “Environment of Care” concept – Its basis, components, and use in overall project design, and identify the Advocacy role of the Environmental Standards Council, how it supports the work of the Center for Health Design, and how you can participate.

A Safety Risk Assessment (SRA) is required as part of the 2014 FGI Guidelines for the Design and Construction of Hospitals and Outpatient Facilities. To support this, The Center for Health Design has been developing a toolkit to provide a systematic way of addressing the underlying conditions that may cause risk for adverse events in healthcare. This offers teams a way to proactively engage in safety-based discussions early in the process with opportunities for check-ins throughout the project lifecycle. 

Is it possible to decrease patient fall injury severity using a flooring material? Playground surfaces are required to have a force reduction factor to reduce the number and severity of head injuries among children. This is not true yet for healthcare flooring. This presentation describes the role flooring material has on patient and resident falls and fall injury, and identifies current and future research study needs.

Healthy soundscapes are paramount to the missions of hospitals: patients need to sleep and heal without unnecessary environmental stressors; staff, patients, and family need to communicate accurately but privately; staff need to be able to localize alarms and calls for help. There is growing research evidence of the potentially negative effects of poor soundscapes on hospital occupants. Explore recent findings from the Healthcare Acoustics Research Team (HART), an international collaboration of specialists in architecture, engineering, medicine, nursing, and psychology. 

Enactment of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is transforming just about every aspect of healthcare delivery in order to achieve the Triple Aim goals of better care, healthier people and communities and affordable care. One of the law’s most striking and fundamental changes is the shift in reimbursement practices – moving volume to value. This presentation provides an overview of the design team implications of the ACA, such as the Hospital Consumer Assessment of the Healthcare Providers and Systems survey and the Partnership for Patients program. Learn how architects, designers and facility managers can contribute to solutions that achieve these outcomes.