Healthcare Design - November 2019 - 16

MONITOR

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RESEARCH BRIEF

EXPLORING THE USE
O F S TA N D A R D I Z E D P O E
EVIDENCE-BASED DESIGN (EBD) refers
to the process of making design decisions for the built environment based
on what research has proven effective,
all in the hope of achieving the best
outcomes possible. And while tools are
available to help measure the effectiveness of EBD principles, they've not
been universally adopted by organizations. To that end, a research
team decided to implement a post-occupancy evaluation (POE) tool
on a major academic medical center's new bed tower. The results
are shared in the case study "Utilization of a Standardized Postoccupancy Evaluation to Assess the Guiding Principles of a Major
Academic Medical Center" by Zack Altizer, William J. Canar, Dave
Redemske, Francis Fullam, and Mike Lamont. It's published in the latest issue of Health Environments Research & Design Journal (HERD).
The team notes that many challenges have hindered universal
adoption of POE. For one, architecture firms frequently have
internal models that aren't shared with the market at large nor are
used on every project. Additional hurdles include the difficulty of
replication since most POEs are customized for a specific project,
meaning there's an inherent lack of standardization that makes it
difficult to generalize or reproduce approaches. However, this gap
narrowed in 2015 when The Center for Health Design introduced a
Patient Room Design Checklist and Evaluation Tool, which provides
a standardized POE survey to assess facilities and their implemented design features. The reliability and validity of the tool had not
been assessed, though, so this study became a pilot effort.
Data collected consisted of 23 reviews conducted by eight
auditors across three rooms. The internal benchmark for the study
was to achieve an overall score of greater than 75 percent (it only
achieved an overall score of 69.9). But the main intent of the study
was to pilot the use of the checklist itself to see if the research team
could begin to develop an internal and reproducible POE process.
Some shortcomings of the process were noted, though, most significant being low inter-rater reliability, highlighting a lack of training
for participants as well as the subjective nature of the questionnaire. "There were several limitations to our effort worth highlighting, with the most prominent being the following: reliability and
validity of the CHD questionnaire, the need for more clinical personnel in the audit, and the development of a more robust training
program to help standardize auditing practices," the study reads.
Looking forward, the team identified opportunities, speculating
that more success may be seen if auditors were given not just more
training but feedback on assessments to achieve more consistency.
The case study also suggests future efforts might investigate how
auditors would use the survey in unfamiliar surroundings (auditors
were already familiar with the patient rooms assessed).

The full case study is available exclusively to Healthcare Design
readers on the HERD website until Jan. 5, 2020. To read it, visit
https://bit.ly/2zbyYxy.

NOVEMBER 2019

HCDMAGAZINE.COM

http://WWW.healthcaretec.com http://WWW.healthcaretec.com https://bit.ly/2zbyYxy http://www.HCDMAGAZINE.COM

Healthcare Design - November 2019

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