Outcomes From Evidence and Intuition Both Generate Best Practice

I have just returned from October’s HealthCare Design ’22 conference and expo in San Antonio where I attended my first live event since the start of COVID-19. I was able to drive and avoid flying. I’m still cautious about large gatherings of people without masks. I have missed it. What a joy to see so many old and new friends, all of whom are interested in improving design for health, patientand family-centered care, and evidence-based practice. I particularly enjoyed celebrating the well-deserved recognition of two wonderful colleagues: Texas A&M’s Ray Pentecost received the prestigious Changemaker Award from the nonprofit Center for Health Design and Cornell’s Mardelle Shepley received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American College of Healthcare Architects. I had two informal opportunities in San Antonio to share an opinion about evidence-based design concepts, intuitive designs, and their relationship to best practice. It is a framework I’ve shared with my students and audiences before, including editorials in the Health Environments Research & Design Journal (Hamilton, 2017, 2019). I was encouraged by people at the conference to publish something further about how best practice is generated by measuring and sharing outcomes from both evidence-based and intuitive design interventions.