When visiting a doctor’s office or being treated in a hospital, one of the most important but often overlooked aspects of the patient experience is the sonic environment: what a patient hears—or doesn’t hear—while spending time at the facility.
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“In health care, the patient experience is paramount,” explained Bennett Brooks, president of Brooks Acoustics, which has served the South Florida market for more than 20 years, and has offices in Pompano Beach. “That experience is degraded if there is noise or vibration in an exam room, or if a patient who is staying overnight at the hospital can’t sleep because of the noise.”Not only can unwanted noise or vibrations make a patient uncomfortable, but it can also result in health care facilities receiving lower reimbursements from Medicaid. “Patients complete a HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) survey when they leave the hospital, which asks the question ‘was the area around your room quiet at night?’” Brooks explained. “A health care facility’s reimbursement is directly affected by these survey scores—plus or minus 1 percent of total reimbursements. This can be a significant amount of money and a substantial incentive to improve HCAHPS scores.” In 2017, the law will raise this reward or penalty to 2 percent of total reimbursement.
Noise can come in many forms, from floor or room alarms, to talking at nurses’ stations, to how people behave in hallways, according to Brooks. While much can be done to improve acoustical issues, the first step is to conduct an assessment that takes into account a facility’s strengths, weaknesses and where improvements can be made. “This is why we like to get involved in the early planning stages of a building to make sure that the facility meets high-quality acoustical standards—for example, not placing sensitive patient areas next to high noise and vibration areas,” said Brooks. “You can always fix these issues afterwards, but it is more expensive than to do it right the first time.
“It’s important that acoustical upgrades are integrated into a facility’s maintenance budget or capital improvement plans, so that there is less need to retrofit,” he added. “You don’t want a shiny new facility that sounds terrible. Unfortunately, sound is often not considered, and problems may not be immediately apparent until a facility is fully operational.”
Brooks Acoustics’ engineers study a building’s structure and adjacencies to make sure that rooms that serve different functions are organized so that those functions do not interfere with each other. “Even those temporal qualities that come and go, such as problems that only happen when an MRI is running, have to be considered,” he said. “If there are doctors’ offices surrounding the MRI machine, the noise may prevent them from being able to work.”
Brooks Acoustics has a wealth of experience in built environments, specifically in hospitals and other health care facilities, including imaging centers, doctors’ offices, teaching colleges and universities, and retirement and assisted living facilities. “In operating rooms, ERs, post-op rooms and patient rooms, precise communication is essential and mandatory,” said Brooks. “In assisted living facilities, the dining room is the big thing; it’s the resident’s socialization spot, so the ability to hear a conversation is very important.
“Health care is very specialized, and we are one of the only nationally and internationally recognized acoustical engineering firms in South Florida that concentrates in this area,” he added. “We are excited about the opportunity to work with South Florida providers to create healthy sonic environments.”
