Center for Health Design

Saint Alphonsus also had a "design lab" incorporating proposed features. To create it, the hospital turned a floor of offices in its existing building into 40 private rooms for patients, each set up with zones for patient, family, and staff. The new unit has high-­quality acoustic ceiling tiles, carpeted halls, art opposite each patient's bed, and alcoves where nurses can update charts and remain close to their patients. Once patients moved in, the staff recorded data about noise and sleep. They found that while some hospitals see noise levels surge to 90 decibels, this unit kept noise to an average of 51 decibels, and, perhaps not surprisingly, its patients rated the quality of their sleep much higher than patients on other floors (on a scale of one to 10, the new unit rated 7.3 compared with just 4.9 elsewhere). "By building this unit, we learned a lot. We'll change some things for the new one. We also learned which things we definitely wouldn't give up, our nonnegotiables," Gibson says. "First on that list are the acoustic tiles."

Gibson's enthusiasm is infectious. And that's precisely the idea behind the Center for Health Design's Pebble Project, in which hospitals that are renovating or building get access to volumes of research and recommendations about design in return for gathering their own data about the design's effectiveness once construction is complete. Dozens of hospitals are participating, with more joining all the time.