Hospitals are supposed to be healing environments. But all too often, they’re not. Beeping monitors at the bedside frighten patients. Clanging food trays keep them awake. Patients are frequently transferred to different rooms, confusing them and confounding their families. Glaring fluorescent lights make everyone look unhealthy. And privacy? Not likely.

A growing body of research, however, is demonstrating that a more welcoming, caring, comforting hospital environment can help patients heal better and faster. While hospitalization never will be confused with a trip to a resort hotel, this research suggests that more sensitive delivery of care in a more therapeutic environment can benefit patients and have a positive bottom-line impact on healthcare institutions. In our cost-conscious era, those are results that can’t be dismissed.

In 1997, officials at Clarian Health Partners Inc. began discussing ways to make cardiac care operations at its Methodist Hospital of Indiana more patient focused and family friendly. (Methodist is a 750-bed acute-care teaching hospital in downtown Indianapolis that admits 47,000 patients annually.)

Figure 1: View from the reception area to family retreat area and interior garden

One inspiration for this new focus was the San Francisco-based Planetree Model Hospital Project, in which hospital units have been reconstructed to increase patients’ control over their environment. Another was the work of Jain Malkin, who teaches healthcare design at Harvard University and has written extensively about the design of healing environments and the role that family and friends play in patients’ recoveries. Ideas also came from time and motion research and the personal experience of Ann Hendrich, Clarian Health’s senior vice president and nurse executive, who saw firsthand the disquieting effect of traditional care delivery on patients and families when her parents were hospitalized for cardiac problems that year.

By 1998, Clarian Health officials had decided to try the patient-friendly approach by remaking Methodist’s cardiac critical care unit. BSA Design Inc. was awarded this challenge, told to complete the project within 12 months, and given a construction budget of $6.2 million, or $137 per square foot. That’s on par with what the hospital had spent in the past on its more traditional construction projects.

The Methodist Hospital Cardiac Comprehensive Critical Care unit began treating patients in February 1999. Although it is too early for quantitative results, anecdotal evidence from the first 90 days of operation indicates it has more than fulfilled Clarian Health’s hopes for an environment that promotes healing by putting patients first.

Figure 2: A patient room

The new environment also has produced other benefits-nurses in the unit are more easily learning new skills from each other, for example. There have been some disappointments, too. The change has been too different for some employees, who have transferred to return to work in more traditional critical care units.

Overall, though, BSA and Clarian Health believe the project’s many successes and lessons can be useful to other healthcare design teams working to produce patient-friendly facilities to treat cancer, neurological conditions, and other illnesses. Here’s what we did and what we learned.