Beyond beautiful: Interior design brings a bounty of benefits to integrative care providers

Photo Cred: Jason Goodman/Unsplash

By John McCormack

An interior makeover can provide integrative care practices with much more than a new look. Integrative care providers who have focused on interior design are quick to note a variety of patient care, staff satisfaction, and bottom-line benefits. 

“Patients will often say my blood pressure always runs lower in this office than it does in every other doctor’s office … because the environment is so calming,” said Jeff Gladd, MD, founder of GladdMD, an integrative medical practice in Fort Wayne, Ind., that underwent a comprehensive interior reboot about 11 years ago.

Daniel Grossman, DC, heard similar comments when Bell Wellness, a fully integrated multidisciplinary medical group, created an interior vibe that meshed with the historic building that the practice recently moved into in Middleton, N.J.

“We get compliments all the time, especially from new patients coming in. When they walk in, there’s that ‘wow’ factor,” Grossman said.

The design also is eliciting a positive reaction from staff members. Not only are they finding it easier to be more productive but because they enjoy their surroundings, they are providing “uplifting” service, according to Grossman.

A new look also can help bolster revenue by attracting new patients, said Carolyn Meyer Boldt, IIDA, LEED AP, NCIDQ, registered designer, vice president, and director of design, at CrossFields, in Gainesville, Georgia. For example, after moving into a newly designed space, an integrative provider that Myer Boldt worked with noticed that many of his contacts in the community – bankers, attorneys, and others who had never before sought care – started to come into the practice for various services.

While these anecdotal observations make a strong case for interior design, some studies go a step further, showing a definite link between design and outcomes. Results from such studies were cited in a report from the Healthcare Facilities Symposium and Expo:

• Bipolar disorder patients spent an average of four fewer days in the hospital when they were assigned east-facing rooms that captured morning sunlight.
• After redesigning the neonatal intensive care unit in a Swedish hospital, stays for premature infants shortened.
• Aggressive patients received 70 percent fewer sedative injections when placed in rooms that featured posters depicting scenes of nature compared to those in rooms with blank walls.

To the top of the ‘to-do’ list

With so much pointing to the value of pleasing, productive environments, integrative professionals should make interior design a priority, according to Meyer Boldt.

“Patients have a psychological reaction when they walk into an office or clinical space. Integrative care providers can either choose to make that interior design work for them or, if they don’t pay attention to it, work against them,” she said. 

Making the decision to hone in on interior design is, perhaps, even more important for integrative care providers than for conventional healthcare professionals.

“Integrative care is usually a choice for patients, in that they’re not driven by the medical insurer to go to a specific doctor. A lot of integrative care providers are in a cash-based competitive [market],” Meyer Boldt said. 

In addition, the physical environment takes on importance because patients and clients typically spend more time with integrative care professionals than they do with conventional providers.

“Integrative care professionals are seeing patients two, three times a week. The patients have to want to be there,” Grossman noted.

Gladd, who also serves as chief medical officer at Fullscript, an Ontario, Canada-based company that offers an integrative medicine care delivery platform, pointed out that his practice aims to offer comfort and privacy to patients, as they often spend an hour or more in educational sessions, opposed to typical 10-minute conventional medicine appointments.  

Interior design best practices

Once making the choice to pursue a more pleasing interior, integrative professionals should:

Make sure that form follows function. Integrative providers need to work in a functional environment that provides adequate space for the various types of therapies they are delivering, according to Meyer Boldt. “If the space is too small, that impedes their function and flow. It slows them down and that can impede them financially,” she said.

Customize each space. Bell Wellness is designed so that each space has a different feel that supports the type of care delivered. “For example, we have a quiet peaceful space, which is a wing that we created for our acupuncture and massage therapy. Then we have our very active physical therapy spaces, where we have a lot of light and energy,” Grossman said. “If one patient, for example, was seeing two different providers in the same day, they may get two completely different experiences.”

Bring the outside in.“We know that nature, sunlight, natural materials, plants, all of those things actually aid in healing overall. So, whenever you can incorporate that across the board, that’s a good thing to do,” Meyer Boldt said.

Keep staff needs top of mind. Employing staff looms as one of the biggest expenses for care providers. As such, employee satisfaction needs to be a top concern. “They need to have what they need at their fingertips. They need to be able to move from one place to the other physically, along with easy access to technology such as electronic medical records,” Meyer Boldt said.

Use an extra set of eyes. “The practitioner should choose someone else to evaluate interior design needs – so that they are not just seeing it through their own eyes. One of the biggest challenges is that you just get so comfortable and so familiar, you don’t see what’s good and what’s wrong. If you can, bring in a trusted person – perhaps someone who is close to your ideal patient – and walk that person through the space with you, with the understanding that they’re going to be honest and give you their opinion,” Meyer Boldt said.

Define your needs. Grossman recommends asking a series of questions that illuminate specific practice needs before launching an interior design initiative:

• How many patients does the practice need to accommodate comfortably?
• How many patients need to use common areas?
• How many computers will be needed and where will they be placed, so that staff can easily access them?
• How can the design accommodate specific services? For example, is there a need for an exam table and what are the space requirements needed for a provider to exam a patient on the table?

Rely on an expert. Grossman pointed out that leveraging the services of a designer made it possible “to see the whole picture and pull everything together. The designer has been [the expertise] to see things that the typical integrative care provider is likely to miss.”

Find some inspiration.“Go visit spas and medical clinics and sit in the lobby and think about how it makes you feel. Think if it makes you feel comfortable or if it feels like a healing environment,” Gladd said. “Going around to various places can help you learn just what you want to include in your design.”  

Do some bargain hunting.“Many integrated practitioners are on a shoestring budget. It’s possible to achieve the right look inexpensively,” Gladd concluded. “We created something that doesn’t look like it was created on a budget by using low-cost retailers. Spend the extra time searching some of these places where you can find good deals and still have all of the design elements you want. It doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg to be able to create that environment.”