Tools and Resources

• Healthy Building Guidelines
• Green Guide for Health Care
• Case Studies
• Health Benefits of Green Building
• Worker Productivity and Green Building
• Green Building Costs and Benefits
• Health Care Construction Spending
• Press Coverage
• Key Organizational Resources
• Regional Initiatives

Healthy Building Guidelines

Driven by a concern for public health, a desire to reduce operating costs, and a sense of social responsibility, health care institutions are increasingly embracing healthy building goals. In practice, however, it can often be difficult to determine what it means to integrate environmentally responsible design and building materials into a building framework.

Fortunately, there are a number of resources available that help establish concrete guidelines for healthy building materials and practices. The following links provide a preliminary — but far from comprehensive — set of these guidelines for what it really means to "build green."

• Healthy & Sustainable Flooring, choosing resilient flooring for the European healthcare sector
• 
  Sustainable Health Care Architecture, a resource from Robin Guenther and Gail Vittori, Co-Coordinators of the Green Guide for Health Care. Includes case studies of more than 50 of the best contemporary sustainable healthcare projects, as well as numerous essays contributed by other leaders in sustainable design and healthcare. Additionally, the authors provide background information on LEED for Healthcare, as well as on the Green Guide for Health Care, which they were instrumental in developing.
• ASHE Green Healthcare Construction Guidance Statement (pdf)
  Vision statement and comprehensive check list of green design and construction goals and strategies developed by the American Society for Healthcare Engineering.
• Green and Healthy Buildings for the Healthcare Industry (pdf)
  Article by Gail Vittori of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems on planning for a green healthcare facility.
• Kaiser Permanente Position Statement on Green Buildings (pdf)
  Mission statement from Kaiser on green construction in its healthcare facilities.
• Minnesota Sustainable Design Guide, Public Review Draft version 2.1 (pdf)
  The Guide is a design tool that can be used to overlay environmental issues on the design, construction, and operation of both new and renovated facilities. It can be used to set sustainable design priorities and goals; develop appropriate sustainable design strategies; and to determine performance measures to guide the sustainable design and decision-making processes.
• CHPS 1350 Specifications (pdf)
  Review of the progressive specifications developed by and now in use by the State of California with an emphasis on their treatment of indoor air quality issues and discussion of issues for healthcare.
• Key Questions for Environmentally Preferable Flooring Selection (pdf)
  Questions to ask a manufacturer to understand the life cycle impact of a flooring product (adaptable to other products).

Green Guide for Health Care

• Download the free Green Guide for Health Care
  (pdf; requires free registration)
• Download the GGHC Brochure: Imagine (pdf)
• FAQ about GGHC

Case Studies

More than 100 health care systems — representing more than 32 million square feet of construction — are using the Green Guide for Health Care to build and operate hospitals and health care facilities that are healthier for people and the environment.

• Case Study: Kaiser Permanente Modesto Medical Center — A Model for Healthy Building (pdf)
  Kaiser Permanente's new 50-acre, 650,000-square-foot, full-service medical campus in Modesto, California is a model high performance healing environment. KP is pilot testing several cutting-edge green designs and techniques at the site — and saving money in the process.
• Case Study: The Patrick H. Dollard Health Center at the Center for Discovery, Certified LEED for New Construction
  A health center in rural, upstate New York serving a population of 250 full-time residents with neurological and developmental impairments. The design emphasizes environmental health goals to minimize building materials that contain or off-gas toxic chemicals.
• Case Study: Providence Newberg Medical Center, LEED for New Construction Gold Certified
  This 180,636-square-foot complex in Newberg, OR, includes an acute care hospital, medical offices, and administrative services. The project team focused on establishing a robust integrated design process that encouraged community involvement and focused on life-cycle cost evaluations of new technologies and safer materials.
• Green Healthcare Construction Case Studies (pdf)
  Green healthcare case studies assembled by the Healthy Building Network.
• Green Building example from Austria (pdf)

Health Benefits of Green Building

• Building-related health effects: What do we know? (pdf)
  Prepared by Ted Schettler, Science and Environmental Health Network, for the Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine: Workshop #8 — Green Healthcare Institutions: Health, Environment, Economics.
• Center for Health Design Research Reports (pdf)
  Six research reports on a variety of topics, including evidence-based design research, healing gardens, hospital site visits, patient-centered design, and hospital building design. (Executive Summaries and TOCs)

Worker Productivity and Green Building

The following studies examine the effect that daylighting, a popular green building technique, has on productivity.

• Daylight exposure and the other predictors of burnout among nurses in a University Hospital
• Analysis of the Performance of Students in Daylit Schools (Innovative Design)
• Daylighting and Productivity (Heschong Mahone Group)

Green Building Costs and Benefits

• Green Building Costs and Financial Benefits
  Full report (pdf)
  10-page summary (pdf)
  Slide presentation (ppt)
  Landmark report to over 40 California state agencies that provides the first rigorous assessment of the costs and benefits of green buildings.
• Values-Driven Design and Construction: Enriching Community Benefits through Green Hospitals (pdf)
  Paper presented by The Center for Health design and Health Care Without Harm at a conference in September 2006 sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as part of the "Designing the 21st Century Hospital" project.
• Green Buildings and the Bottom Line: the "New Reality" of Green Building from Environmental Cause to Financial Opportunity. 2006 White Paper published by Building Design + Construction
• How to Make the Business Case for Green Building in Healthcare (ppt). October 2006 Green Guide for Health Care e-newsletter.
• Greening Health Care Facilities: a CEO's Perspective (ppt)
  The CleanMed 2006 conference in Seattle, Washington, featured presentations by health care CEO's across the country. The remarks are a summary of their collective perspective on the value of green building and operations.
• Business Case for Green Buildings
  Excerpts adapted from the panel discussion "The Business Case for Green Buildings" presented at CleanMed 2006 in Seattle.
• DBIA/Penn State Healthcare Industry Study (pdf)
  During September and October of 2005, the Design/Build Institute of America held four regional conferences on the delivery of healthcare facilities. Penn State collected survey data from conference attendees concerning opinions about green healthcare facilities.
• Case Study: Kaiser Permanente Modesto Medical Center — A Model for Healthy Building (pdf)
  Kaiser Permanente's new 50-acre, 650,000-square-foot, full-service medical campus in Modesto, California is a model high performance healing environment.

Health Care Construction Spending

• Healthcare building strong through 2008
• After a Strong 2007, Nonresidential Construction Growth Projected to Moderate in 2008
• US Census Bureau Construction Spending
• Health Care Construction Boom Continues
• Hospital Construction Boom Has Not Slowed Down
• McGraw-Hill Construction Health Care Green Building SmartMarket Report: 2007 (Report must be purchased)

Press Coverage

• Time Magazine
  Green Guide for Health Care Co-Coordinator Gail Vittori spotlighted in "Innovators" column, 4/07
• Metropolis
  Profile of Green Guide for Health Care Co-Coordinator Robin Guenther, FAIA in "A Healthy Obsession," 6/07
• National Public Radio
  Hospitals Going Green, 5/06
• Clean Design magazine
  Stories from CleanMed 2006 conference, including the Architecture of Healing, The Business Case for Green Building, Boston Green Building, and much more.
• Time Magazine, 5/06
  Healthier Hospital Food
• Eco-Structure Magazine, July/Aug 2006: Discovery Health Center, Perspectives from Health Care Without Harm, News from Green Guide for Healthcare (all pdf)
• Architectural Record (pdf)
  Environmentally-Friendly Building Strategies Slowly Make Their Way Into Medical Facilities; By Nancy Solomon, AIA.
• Building Design + Construction
  14 Steps to Greener Hospitals, 2/06
• Environmental Building News (pdf)
  Hospital, Heal Thyself
• Interior Design
  Building on the Past, article about the Jay Monihan cancer center, built without materials linked to cancer, 2/05

Key Organizational Resources

• Practice Greenhealth
• Healthy Building Network
• US Green Building Council
• CleanMed

Regional Initiatives

• Greening Healthcare Facilities Roundtable  (pdf)
  A 65-page summary report of a green healthcare roundtable held in October 2005 by key members of the building industry, green design community, healthcare industry, academic institutions, and government agencies. The meeting's purpose was to form a consortium to improve how healthcare facilities are planned, designed, constructed, and maintained.
• Design for Health Summit (pdf)
• Setting Healthcare's Environmental Agenda (pdf)