Strengthening the healthcare guidelines: About the new online research community.

Myriad challenges and opportunities exist for researchers in the 2010 edition of the Guidelines for the Design and Construction of Healthcare Facilities. The new edition, released in January, contains the first comprehensive acoustical criteria ever included in the 60‐year‐old Guidelines that are now being adopted as code by most states, federal agencies, and municipalities. Enforcement—and future strengthening—of these Guidelines will require a strong, organized, well‐funded research community in acoustics willing to do transdisciplinary research. Since federal agencies do not actively support research on the human impacts of noise in healthcare facilities but some private foundations do, the drafters of the Guidelines recently launched an online research community to enable research teams across the country to interact directly with interested foundations, government agencies, policy groups, and healthcare organizations. The online community has a distinguished Advisory Board of interested professionals in acoustical science, medicine, healthcare architecture, and engineering. It hosts an open database of recent research on acoustics and human health, RFPs and announcements, links to interested groups such as ICBEN, the World Health Organization and UIA‐PHG, and other features such as blogs and wikis.