The impact of good, evidence-based design on patient care and recovery outcomes in healthcare is well established. The built environment can impact positively on patient safety, staff effectiveness and morale, reported visitor satisfaction, bed turnover rate, increased market share for healthcare facilities, and more.

The benefits of patient engagement is equally well recognised. Increasingly, patients expect to be involved in their own care and treatment, with engaged patients showing better health outcomes than those treated in more passive environments. This premise can be readily extended to control over the physical environment in which care is received.

In this paper, the authors will seek to demonstrate how their ‘Building Performance for People’ concept seeks to blur the boundaries between wellbeing, building performance optimisation, and sustainable design and operation, through the combination of specialist services to target built environment design and operation for maximum comfort, satisfaction, and utility for staff, patients and visitors.

Building Performance for People connects staff and patients directly to their buildings and environments, facilitating greater control and autonomy in healthcare settings. Using a simple, phone-based user interface the patient or staff member can communicate their level of comfort and satisfaction in any area of the hospital. Patient data is overlaid with technical building performance data from sensors located throughout the building, monitoring air quality, temperature, lighting levels and occupancy.

Information is collated, analysed and provided for asset management professionals or directly to building management systems. This creates a smart, responsive environment and allows for changes in the building to be closely monitored for negative impacts on the occupants. Information is also provided directly back to patients and other occupants, supporting building use decision-making.

Aggregated data will be collated from multiple healthcare locations, adding to the growing data set supporting an evidence-based design approach to healthcare facilities, refocusing on human comfort and away from (sometimes) arbitrary technical parameters for building performance. The ActIF service can be adapted to gather specific healthcare information or tailored to monitor specific concerns within a particular facility, if required.