What we do
The Mass General Brigham Health Design Lab unites clinical, architectural, and design professionals with a mission to advance the collaboration between health care and design across four domains: research; education; clinical practice and innovation; and bioethics and policy.
Our common purpose is to improve care delivery, patient outcomes, and patient and provider satisfaction through design.
Our mission
The goal of the Lab is to improve care delivery through the clinician-designer model, where health care practitioners and designers work together to find solutions to problems with the built environment of hospitals and care settings.
Research: Investigate the health effects of specific architectural interventions. For example, answering key questions about the built environment’s impact on health outcomes; development of research-based post-occupancy evaluation tools to assist in quantifying building effects; cost-benefit analysis of design interventions, etc.
Education: Establish academic curricula to advance the development of a new hybrid field of medicine and architecture. Emerging professionals in both industries seek a convergence of career models which can inspire new modes of practice.
Clinical Practice & Innovation: Facilitate design-related innovations in clinical practice with the goal of improving new and existing care delivery spaces.
Bioethics & Policy: Assess the ethical aspects of design and health–and, in turn, examine policies at the institutional level. Even small design ideas or changes can have far-reaching implications. This is no better exemplified than in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Lab will strive to consider these aspects in its research, educational, and innovation priorities. The Lab will advocate for ethically beneficial design interventions by escalating them to the appropriate institutional or political levels of leadership.
How design impacts health
Evidence-based design research is a growing body of empirical data demonstrating that architecture impacts care delivery as well as health outcomes.
The built environment—in this case hospitals and clinics where health care is delivered—is an important determinant of health. The built environment should be considered alongside other parameters of care, like physical and social determinants of health.
This lab creates a convergence of the health care and design disciplines in order to promote innovative and novel solutions to improve clinical spaces and subsequently support equitable, safe, and efficient care delivery.
The COVID-19 global pandemic brought many of these issues to the forefront. The pandemic illuminated infection prevention/control inequities among building types. It stressed existing building designs to their limits as patient volume surged. It created a crisis of burnout and retention among frontline health care workers.
Research supports a role for design in health care, yet there remain many unanswered questions. The effects of the built and digital environment on patient outcomes, care delivery cost and efficiency, and health equity remain undiscovered. The Lab’s primary work will be to augment this body of evidence and bring it from “bench-to-bedside” through clinical innovations.
Research
Our members are participating as leaders, experts, and consultants on research happening in health care and industry.
Skylight study
Who we are
The Health Design Lab includes an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, designers, and researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), Harvard Medical School (HMS), HMS Lab for Bioethics, and other Boston area collaborators.
Lab leadership
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Dr. Smith is a Harvard faculty physician with an innovation and design focus in medicine. He is the Principal Investigator and co-founder of the Mass General Brigham Health Design Lab.
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Dr. Anderson is a board-certified health care architect, internist, and geriatrician. As a “dochitect,” she combines her educational and professional experience in medicine and architecture.
Advisory members
Dr. Allen is an associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of Harvard’s Healthy Building program, where he and his team created the “9 Foundations of Healthy Building.” Working with John Macomber of the Harvard Business School, Allen coauthored Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity.
Elaine C. Meyer, PhD, RN, is a nurse, clinical psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, and associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. She received her MBE from Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics. Her work emphasizes patient/family perspectives and priorities, end-of-life care, challenging conversations in healthcare, and simulation education. Bioethics interests focus on everyday clinical ethical encounters, serving vulnerable populations, and humanism in healthcare.
