The Workshop
Infection control and prevention has been a critical consideration in the design and construction of the healthcare-built environment for decades and given what we have experienced throughout the Covid pandemic, it remains a top priority. Implementing some of the latest best practices in the physical healthcare environment can help to minimize their impact—and help to produce the best outcomes for patients, families and staff.
This intensive and interactive workshop will explore new and evolving approaches to infection control through new design innovations, clinical methods, technologies, and protocols. Attendees will participate in an interactive forum lead by industry experts including infection preventionists, environmental services leaders, facility managers, industry partners, and design specialists and will explore the importance of integrating the available options to continually improve outcomes and mitigate the risk of infection.
Agenda
Welcome, Opening Remarks & Introductions
Shari Solomon, Esq., Industrial Hygienist & President, CleanHealth Environmental, LLC
Opening Keynote Presentation
Komal K. Jain, Executive Director, Center for Biocide Chemistries
Reducing the Risk of Healthcare Associated Infections from Waterborne Pathogens During Construction Activities
Molly M. Scanlon, PhD, FAIA, FACHA, Director of Standards, Compliance and Research, Phigenics
Buildings, Occupant Health, and Antibacterial Resistance
Stephanie H. Taylor MD, M Arch, CIC, FRSPH(UK), ASHRAE Distinguished Lecturer, Epidemic Task Force, Environmental Health Committee, Harvard Medical School InciteHealth Fellow
Quantitative Techniques for the Prevention of Healthcare-Associated Infections
Marietta Squire, Johns Hopkins University, Department of Civil and Systems Engineering
Experts
Shari L. Solomon, Esq. is president of CleanHealth Environmental, LLC. CleanHealth provides infection prevention, industrial hygiene and OSHA training and consulting services geared toward facility personnel and vendors responsible for infection prevention, cleaning and disinfection, and facility operations and maintenance practices. Ms. Solomon possesses more than 20 years of environmental consulting and federal regulatory experience. An attorney by trade, combined with her experience in the industrial hygiene field with a focus on infection prevention, Shari holds a unique expertise and understanding of liability prevention techniques, offering clients practical and valuable risk management solutions.
Prior to launching CleanHealth, Shari held the position as Director of Training with a full service industrial hygiene firm and was charged with the development and oversight of all training programs nationwide. Ms. Solomon’s has trained thousands of individuals, both here and abroad, spanning 19 years. Shari also conducts infection prevention services including policy and procedure program development, infection prevention evaluations, litigation support, and environmental quality assessments.
Ms. Solomon is a Designated Trainer under the Certified Healthcare Environmental Services Technician Program (T-CHEST) from The Association for the Healthcare Environment (AHE) of the American Hospital Association as well as a member of Durable Coated Fabrics Task Force, affiliated with the American Academy of Healthcare Interior Designers (AAHID). Shari is a Certified Indoor Environmental Consultant (CIEC) through the ACAC and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Florida and a Juris Doctorate from The Catholic University of America.
Komal K. Jain serves as the Executive Director of the Center for Biocide Chemistries. She supports the Center’s work on a broad range of scientific, regulatory, legislative, legal and educational issues unique to antimicrobial pesticides. Her work involves analyzing state, national and international legislative and regulatory proposals; developing and drafting regulatory comments and other communications; and working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other regulators on advancing the antimicrobials program.
Ms. Jain has a juris doctorate and spent almost 20 years in private and government practice before joining the American Chemistry Council in 2013.
Molly M. Scanlon, PhD, FAIA, FACHA is an Environmental Health Scientist, as well as a licensed and certified Healthcare Architect. Dr. Scanlon has 25+ years of design experience for healthcare settings to create environments benefiting the health, safety, and welfare of patients, nurses, physicians, and staff. As Phigenics’ Director of Standards, Compliance and Research, Dr. Scanlon’s practice involves examining the built environment’s impact on human health to reduce illness and injury from exposure to waterborne pathogens in building water systems with an emphasis on reducing risk from construction activities. She recently served as Chair of the American Institute of Architects National COVID-19 Task Force for Alternative Care Sites during the pandemic response. Dr. Scanlon also contributed as an author and content developer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC)’s Prevent LD (Legionnaires’ Disease) Online Training Program through work as an associate instructor at the University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.
Dr. Taylor’s work focuses on understanding the relationship between the built environment and occupant health with the goal of managing indoor air quality and other building parameters to decrease acute and chronic diseases.
After receiving her MD from Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, she practiced clinical medicine for the next several decades.
While caring for hospitalized patients, Dr. Taylor became convinced that indoor environmental management played a substantial, yet unaddressed, role in patient infections. Determined to gain a better understanding of buildings and mechanical systems, she returned to school and obtained a master’s degree in Architecture. Her work now focuses on designing, building, and maintaining all occupied buildings with the explicit goal of optimizing human health and productivity. During this work, she realized that there was little medical data on how the indoor environment affects human physiology.
Dr. Taylor is the CEO and Founder of Building4Health, Inc (B4H). Their sensor suite, analytical platform and occupant facing dashboard make visible the complex relationship between indoor air metrics and human physiology – thus allowing a determination of whether an indoor ecosystem has a positive or negative impact on occupant health. The B4H health standard pioneers the evaluation the impact of the indoor environment on human health.
Dr. Taylor is an active member of ASHRAE, and is a member of their Epidemic Task Force, Environmental Health Committee, and is a Distinguished Lecturer. She received the “Top 20 Women to Watch in Healthcare Engineering” award in 2019 and is a recipient of the ASHRAE Presidential Award for distinguished service during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also writes a monthly column for Engineered Systems.
As a PhD student and PhD graduate, Marietta Squire works and collaborates with the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering (CaSE) at Johns Hopkins University as well as the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE). She applies systems dynamics and mathematical optimization techniques to assess how to allocate budgets and various resources in a healthcare setting. She also applies mathematical modeling to assess how to bolster patient safety in healthcare. This is applied in order to minimize the transmission of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) within a hospital setting.
She also works with Epidemiology and Infection Control and Prevention teams to quantify the risk of secondary infections at the hospital unit level. This risk quantification can then be used by Infectious Prevention teams in hospitals to inform and serve as a decision support tool to assist in the allocation of infection prevention resources. She also works for the Military Health System managing healthcare facility development projects.