"2010 is still going to be a very challenging year, but it looks like the health care construction market is starting to reawaken a little bit. The spike in municipal bond rates halted projects in 2008 in 2009 but the demand is still there," she says. "Hospitals need to have the latest and greatest in order to attract patients and retain top-quality staff and provide the best kind of care that they can."

Defined by the Center as "the process of basing decisions about the built environment on credible research to achieve the best possible outcomes," evidence-based design (EBD) has increased in popularity over the past decade and has been used effectively in some of the world's most high-profile (and deep-pocketed) medical facilities.


Mayberry's organization is taking the lead in educating executives on EBD's benefits by giving them the data they need to make dollars and cents decisions on implementation. "When we get to the point where we can present data that is so convincing that a hospital executive would not make another decision but to spend the money to incorporate EBD features or go green, then it will be a no-brainer," she says, adding that the biggest pushback to adoption is cost justification.

"The long-term return on evidence-based design and incorporating energy efficiency and some of the things that are included in green design are enormous, and they pay for the cost of the hospital 10 times over or sometimes even 30 times over. But the initial thinking that 'okay, we have to get $210 million instead of $200 million' is a real hard challenge for some people to face. But that's what the Center is all about -- educating people about why they should care about EBD and providing the data to support those decisions."

San Francisco-based architecture firm Anshen + Allen, one of the country's most prominent health care design specialists, helped PeaceHealth integrate EBD principles into their $403 million Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in Springfield, Ore. The leader of Anshen's in-house sustainability committee, Tyler Krehlik, explains how EBD helped drive change at the new facility.

"They took their older facility and did some modeling of what the new patient rooms were going to look like. The original assumption was to put in patient lifts in 10 percent of the rooms," he says. "But after they built the mockup rooms in their existing hospital and saw a drastic reduction in injuries and similar issues, they decided to put them in all of their rooms.It was a no-brainer after they'd seen the numbers coming out of their mockups.

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