Academy of Architecture for Health

The AIA/AAH Case Study Library was officially published online in late 2016 with the goal of “bridging the gap” between research and practice. The original goals of the Case Study effort by the Research Initiatives Committee was the following:

1. Gathering and/or creating case studies to share with the Healthcare Industry
2. Utilizing the AIA/AAH Health Care Design Awards as a “peer-reviewed” source for case studies
3. Defining a standardized format for case studies and encouraging firms and their clients to use it
4. Creating a AIA/AAH Case Study Repository or Library for sharing the case studies

It is the AIA/AAH Research Initiatives Committee’s vision that a more focused and formal approach to collegial sharing of Design Award Winning Project information will help us all do better work. By creating enough project case studies for a qualitative and comparative BASELINE in the Library which will help develop scalable metrics that in turn will provide the industry with some best practice “Rules of Thumb” and “Benchmarking” analyses on our projects which may eventually lead to and encourage additional and more rigorous research opportunities (such as POEs, etc.).

How to Use the Case Study Library:

The typical Case Study highlights the key design intentions of the project and shows photographic images to help identify design features that address those intentions. Each case study also identifies the project, the team, and the overall building gross square footage and completion date, as well as floor by floor interdepartmental Net to Gross Square Footages and Net to Gross Factors are identified. It will also identify minimum and maximum travel distances for patient and staff travel within key departments. Key Clinical Spaces are also identified in terms of typical and average range of net square footages. Finally, as an AIA Academy of Architecture for Health Design Award recipient, the Jury Comments are also included to help explain the award-winning features.

In addition to adding more award-winning Case Studies every year, the Research Initiatives Committee took a deeper dive in 2018 into “benchmarking” Acute Care nursing units and patient rooms using two of the larger hospital Case Studies - Palomar Medical Center and Rush University Medical Center. The purpose of this deeper dive was, and is, to produce a subset repository within the Case Study Library of Nursing Unit and Patient Room typologies using a consistent and rigorous format for more detailed departmental and key clinical space comparison and “benchmarking.”

Examining a series of inpatient facilities in a consistent Case Study format is beneficial in informing a data base repository; and identifying “best practices” and “rules of thumb” case study comparisons are a pre-requisite to a performance-based design approach.

The Case Studies below are in alphabetical order. Each has been categorized and tagged with the following keywords:

1. Acute Care (Hospitals)
     - Medical/Surgical
     - Children's
2. Ambulatory Care
     - Clinics
     - Surgicenters
     - Cancer Care
     - Specialty Care
     - Freestanding ERs
3. Pediatric Care
4. Specialty Care
5. Research Facilities
6. Acute Care - Clinical Departments
     - Emergency Departments
     - Surgery and Interventional Departments
     - Medical/Surgical Bed Units
     - Critical Care Bed Units
     - Radiology/Imaging Departments

The first file provides a graphical index of how projects fall into the various categories above.

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