Clemson finds heart care breakthrough

Clemson University believes that a School of Architecture alumna and faculty members have found that hospital room design, access to daylight and window views of nature can reduce the length of hospital stays among patients with heart disease.  Roxanna Jafarifiroozabadi, a former doctoral student of the Planning, Design and the Built Environment program, alongside professor Anjali Joseph, Director of the Center for Health Design and Testing and Andrea Franks, Nurse Manager for the Clinical & Nursing Research Department at AnMed Health, researched and discovered that access to daylight and window views can reduce the stay of a patient in the cardiac intensive-care unit (CICU) by 16.8 hours, and in some cases reduce the stay by about one day.