Baltimore's health care facilities are in the midst of a building boom—and these places are built for healing.

In the November issue of the Urbanite, Amanda Hurley reports on health care in the Baltimore area. Below is an excerpt of her report discussing the Highlandtown Healthy Living Center.

"Across town, many of the same innovations are at work in the Highlandtown Healthy Living Center on Fleet Street, another community health center, opened in March, that offers family practice, pediatrics, internal medicine, OB/GYN, geriatrics, mental health, and pharmacy services to disadvantaged residents of east Baltimore; roughly a quarter of the center's patients are uninsured, and over half have Medicaid. Occupying 32,500 square feet (the whole second floor) of a new 65,000-square-foot building, the center is the largest of six run by the nonprofit Baltimore Medical System (BMS), with the capacity to serve 22,000 patients. A pharmacy and lab are on the first floor, and the developer—Highlandtown LLC—intends to lease out the remaining space there to complementary health-related businesses.

Patients step off the elevator and into a spacious, cheerful waiting area with butter-yellow walls, lit by a run of floor-to-ceiling windows. Along another side of the room, cubicles with wood walls offer privacy for patients and staff and also help to warm up the interior. Acrylic room-divider screens are embedded with natural grasses "to bring that feeling of being near the water into the space," Sovich says. The same screens are used between cubicles in a staff area. "Patients say that they love the spaciousness, the cleanliness, and the natural light," says Jay Wolvovsky, president and CEO of BMS.

While the new $11 million facility is a vast improvement on the center's previous home on Eastern Avenue, Wolvovsky is candid about the learning curve that staff and patients faced when they moved in and the transitional problems that no design, however thoughtful, could fully anticipate. For example: Because many of the center's patients don't speak English (about 30 percent are Hispanic), printed materials and signage were not always helpful in directing them up to the second floor—instead, a volunteer had to be stationed in the lobby to greet patients coming in.

BMS is hoping to receive LEED Platinum—the highest LEED certification possible—for the center's interior. [The center has now received a LEED Platinum CI for the Interior and LEED Gold C&S for the Core and Shell] Architect Randy Sovich of RM Sovich Architecture used daylighting, a highly efficient HVAC system, lights connected to motion detectors, and water-efficient fixtures to reduce the center's energy use by about 54 percent and its water use by an estimated 43 percent, compared with a standard building. Rather than a green roof, the building has a white roof, another way to reduce energy costs—and carbon emissions. It also has a sidewalk rain garden, which, in tandem with a stormwater management system, handles runoff.

BMS didn't want a green health center as a trophy. On the contrary, says Wolvovsky, the staff had learned through experience with medically underserved people that environment and lifestyle "make a big difference in health status."

The structure is designed to encourage staff to model a healthy lifestyle. A large, airy community meeting room, leading onto a garden terrace, doubles as a lunch area for the center's seventy-five staff members. A bike storage room and shower are in the building's basement for those who commute by bike or exercise on their breaks. "As a community health center, we realized we needed to ... create a building that would epitomize a healthy lifestyle," Wolvovsky explains. "It shows our patients and staff that recycling trash, biking to work, and having a garden ... are things that we think are important enough for health to incorporate into the building."

The results seem to be showing up already. The center is taking part in a study by a doctoral student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who surveyed staff in the old building and will re-interview them in the new space. "We know anecdotally that some staff are no longer using their [asthma] inhalers in the new building," Wolvovsky notes.

Above all, however, what both the Highlandtown clinic and Health Care for the Homeless offer is respect for all patients, regardless of their economic or social station. "What we wanted was an environment that wouldn't feel like it was for people who were disadvantaged. It wouldn't feel lesser because you didn't have insurance," Sovich says. And that can only be good for the people who come here seeking help."

via Urbanite