Speech privacy for healthcare Free

The Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, requires healthcare providers to implement reasonable safeguards to protect the privacy of healthcare information. This includes privacy for oral communications. Architects and facility managers are aware of this mandate, and are calling for these capabilities to be designed into current projects. HIPAA contains no objective, measurable criteria for speech privacy, leaving the design team to select specific criteria for their project. Criteria options will be discussed including Privacy Index and other descriptors that have been developed and correlated with subjective evaluation of privacy. This paper describes several recent projects, which began with evaluations of existing facilities and led to establishment of criteria and design solutions. These studies included various aspects of the healthcare facility such as offices, exam rooms and conference rooms as well as open plan reception, waiting and registration areas. Field conditions, measurement techniques, measurement results, criteria selection and design solutions will be presented.