“Interns, any other ideas?” my attending asked the team as we made our daily rounds to the bedside of Ms. T, an octogenarian who had been in our ICU for just over a week. She suffered from dementia and had undergone a tracheotomy, thus limiting her ability to communicate with us. The concern of my attending that morning was due to her sustained tachycardia, the etiology of which we could not explain; she had not responded to our medical interventions.

I was only days into my internship; how could I have any medical suggestions to address this patient’s heart rate? “We could move her to another room with a window,” I said to the group instead, yielding several questionable looks. “There is evidence,” I added, as I knew physicians would consider an intervention seriously if it had been documented in prior studies.

Read the complete story of one patient’s physiologic response to an environmental intervention and the subsequent change in the clinical team’s approach to considering architectural design and the existing evidence (subscription required).