What is Building Informatics?

As building topics become more focused on occupant health, an important issue becomes the evaluation of buildings. This can ensure that the wide-ranging topics related to Indoor Environmental Quality are supporting the health and wellness of building occupants. However, in order to provide these metrics, there is a need for data to be provided for topics such as indoor air quality, exposures to any toxins, and the importance of measuring natural daylight, sounds or noises, and a wide range of other issues that impact occupant well-being.

This requires data to be measured to evaluate, and while some buildings do measure some topics such as temperature, humidity, and fresh air exchange, there are a lot of gaps involved if a healthy built environment is truly the goal.

While many commercial building inspections will include basic issues such as fresh air exchanges, the typical residential building inspection does not focus on the health of the occupant in a direct manner.

The idea of gathering building data focused on health and wellness requires data sets to evaluate, and therefore there is also a need to measure and record these data sets. Once the data is recorded, there is a need to analyze this data with a focus on occupant health.

 

This is where Building Informatics becomes critical.

 

Building informatics is the analysis of data to “provide information and knowledge to improve human health and the delivery of health care services.” [1]

Throughout this website, the topics of Architectural Medicine and the Architectural Doctor focus on health and wellness in the built environment. And one of the topics included in these discussions is the importance of gathering data and evaluating buildings for health and wellness. However, as I’ve also mentioned in other articles, such as here, the typical building inspection is often focused on the structural integrity of the building and not on the potential health issues of the occupants. While there are occupational health professionals, such as an occupational hygienist, their focus is often on industrial buildings related to safety and health aspects in the workplace.

Yet if the data on buildings related to health are to be included for the doctor and health professional’s evaluations, where will this building data come from? Who will be gathering this information as informatics?

This is the purpose of the Building Informatics and the Building Informaticist — to gather information about buildings related to human health.

 

ARxMD – The Architectural Medicine Software Solution and Building Data for Informatics

Architectural Medicine has developed the ARxMD software (pronounced arcs-med) to provide a platform to measure and record building data focused on health, and this platform also provides the ability for data scientists to evaluate this data as informatics. The term informatics is commonly defined in North America as the following:

“Informatics is the science of how to use data, information and knowledge to improve human health and the delivery of health care services.” [1]

While other regions in the world may define informatics as computational systems or define informatics as synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, the term in North America is utilized in the healthcare sector. The essence of informatics in the United States is to “utilize data as information to improve healthcare processes and results,” as defined by the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA).

The use of this building data when connected to the occupant’s health is where the benefits of building informatics take place. Utilizing the various topics of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) connected to inspections focused on patient health can provide a tremendous amount of helpful data for patient health. The ability to add this data into the electronic health record (EHR) as an expanded health record, defined as a comprehensive health record (CHR), can provide more significant insights into patient and public health that have not occurred before.

The ability to measure, record, and analyze this data for occupant health can then be utilized for the doctor to better help their patient’s medical issues, and in the public health realm, epidemiologists can utilize this data as clinical informatics.

When this data is utilized for better patient and public health, it can help make changes for both healthcare professionals in their observations and provide measurable data for the architecture and building professionals to make buildings safer and healthier.

And the expanse of this data can also include topics such as energy efficiency, carbon neutrality, and ecological impacts, providing support for climate change mitigation topics to help define better processes for more sustainable building solutions worldwide. After all, the building sector uses 40 percent of all energy used in the world. If there are measurements of this data in buildings, then improving energy use can be measured in ways that can provide tremendous positive impacts in the world.

 

The Building Informaticist as Inspector for Health-Related Issues in the Built Environment

As noted in previous paragraphs, the term informaticist refers to the term informatics, which is often related to health professions and professionals. This includes Clinical Informaticists, Public Health Informatics, Translational Bioinformatics, and Biomedical informatics (BMI). As defined by the AMIA (the American Medical Informatics Association ®), Informatics is the “science of how to use data, information and knowledge to improve human health and the delivery of health care services.” [1]

These professions are inclusive of a multi-disciplinary approach to health and medical data analysis. An example of this is Biomedical Informatics (BMI), defined as the “interdisciplinary, scientific field that studies and pursues the effective uses of biomedical data, information, and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem-solving and decision making, motivated by efforts to improve human health.” [2]

A key facet of each of these professionals is the utilization of data as informatics to provide health insights for the medical communities. As such, the Building Informaticist can be added to these definitions by including the built environment in this collection of health data utilizing data science and analysis as informatics for all health-related professions.

As the current informaticist professionals are listed in the health professions, there is a tremendous opportunity to overlap with the architecture and building professionals to gather data to support optimal human health, well-being, and thriving.

This is the key to utilizing building data focused on human and planetary health, which is defined as “Building Informatics.”

 

Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) and Building-Occupant Health

As Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) have continued to increase in popularity, groups such as the Gravity Project strive to include these topics in the healthcare processes. Originating in 2017 following a “multi-stakeholder meeting convened by the Social Interventions Research & Evaluation Network (SIREN),” the Gravity Project “championed a grassroots approach for creating a collaborative that could build social needs data for integration in clinical care.” [3]

Codifying many of these determinants of health can provide an exchange of data with new interoperability standards such as the HL7 FHIR SDoH Implementation Guide. This can help to ensure that data gathered by social workers and other health professionals can be easily exchanged and understood by the clinical physician.

With SDoH topics that include the environment and built environment in patient evaluations, eventually, there is going to be a need to have building professionals, such as the Architectural Doctor and this Building Informaticist to provide building data to help create a clear picture for health professionals to utilize in their diagnosis and evaluation processes.

 

The Architectural Medicine System and the Building Informaticist

In the book “The Architectural Doctor,” the topics of SMART buildings and the use of sensors and resulting big data sets can be utilized to provide insights to support better health and wellness in both the built environment and in public health in general.

An increase in multi-disciplinary professionals in both the health and building fields can provide an overlap between these topics to provide a bridge to a gap that many have not even noticed exists. As the pandemic highlighted the importance of building health, the main question that many may have on their minds is “what can we do about it?”

 

The ARxMD Software Platform

The ability to measure and record this data is paramount to ensuring that buildings are evaluated with beneficial human health in mind. ARxMD – the Architectural Medicine Software Solution, provides the ability to record this data, and provides the ability for multiple professionals to review and analyze this data for better occupant health.

Pronounced arcs-med, this platform allows the doctor, inspector, building informaticist, and architect to work together to provide building evaluations focused on human health. To read more about the ARxMD platform, please visit this page.

 

Building Informatics – Conclusion

The process of providing better built environment health is expanding year after year, yet without the proper gathering of data, the systems to provide such procedures, and evaluations of these data sets, there will continue to be gaps of knowledge that are missing from the health professional’s book of knowledge.

While the increase in SMART buildings and building sensors has expanded to a larger Internet of Things IoT fabric, there is still a tremendous amount of data that is ignored or underutilized. As the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) becomes more common, the geolocation of sensors can overlap with these building sensors to provide a plethora of big data for further evaluation.

Add this to Digitial Twins (DT) in both the building DT and medical DT developments, and now you have an overlap for insights into health that have never before existed.

The Building Informaticist can support this gathering of data to provide larger data sets for both evaluations and to prepare for data scientists in providing deeper insights into health issues. You can read more about this topic of Building Informatics and the Building Informaticist in “The Architectural Doctor” book, which was published in November of 2022.