As the world becomes increasingly connected and information is freely shared, a trend toward interdisciplinary collaboration is taking place in both industry and education. This trend is highlighted by recent collaboration between clinicians and architects in both research and design. In the design of healthcare spaces, architects are working with clinicians and researchers to employ an evidence-based approach to making design decisions.

The advent of Evidence-Based Design represents a shift from basing design decisions solely on tradition or opinion to an approach that emphasizes the importance of using credible research to inform design decisions. The research expertise of clinicians is vital to the practice of Evidence-Based Design, which traces its origins to the well-established concepts of Evidence-Based Medicine. In the context of healthcare, Evidence-Based Design focuses on design interventions that help make hospitals safer and more comfortable for patients and staff, that promote healing, and that are fiscally sustainable.

Through case studies and other examples, this paper illustrates how the growing body of credible research regarding the impact of the built environment on people creates unique opportunities for architects and clinicians to work together toward a common goal of evidence-based practice.

Read more about evidence-based practice and the need for further collaboration between the fields of architecture and medicine.

As medicine has moved toward evidence-based practice, so too has hospital design, which is increasingly guided by research linking physical environments to health care outcomes through the process of evidence-based design. The Paimio Sanatorium, built in the early 1930s in the southwest portion of Finland and designed by the architect Alvar Aalto, demonstrates an appreciation for good design and the ambition to create healing environments that emulate nature.

Prior to the development of evidence-based design, Alvar Aalto created a healing environment addressing each patient’s psychological and social needs. Just as the starting point in the Paimio Sanatorium design was the individual whose privacy and comfort were of central importance, the current field of evidence-based hospital design emulates this focus of the physical setting as therapeutic.

Read more about the Paimio Sanatorium and the features of its healing environment.