Insights & Solutions

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.

Healthcare is provided in a variety of settings, from a person’s home to outpatient clinics, to the hospital. While the settings and specific design elements may differ across the continuum of care, the objectives of safety, efficiency, satisfaction, and high quality care remain constant. This set of interactive diagrams provides a link between the evidence base, design strategies, and desired outcomes – in a visually intuitive and actionable format.

The healthcare community has recently come clean on an important fact: patient perception of your hospital’s cleanliness may impact their overall view of your facility much more than you’d think.

The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey provides patients an important avenue through which to share their views of your hospital’s cleaning practices. Many patients will also use their impression of your physical environment’s look and cleanliness to judge the quality of care they receive.

This Clinic Design Post Occupancy Evaluation Toolkit is self-administered and provides a way to collect a variety of data on the physical enviornment, subjective perception of users, and objective healthcare outcomes.

My Safety Net Clinic (MySNC) was developed by Dr. Larry Mallak and Wasif Butt of Western Michigan University in 2011. MySNC was funded by a grant from the California HealthCare Foundation, in conjunction with The Center for Health Design.