Page 31 - Fall 2008

Standards
SPEECH PRIVACY: MOMENTUM GROWS IN HEALTHCARE
David M. Sykes
Remington Group Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 and
Gregory C. Tocci Cavanaugh Tocci Assoc., Inc. Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776
Overview and context
During the Fall 2004 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego, the issue of speech privacy1 in healthcare facilities was identified as a critical issue by the Technical Committee on Architectural Acoustics (TCAA). Their discussions resulted in the establishment of the Joint Subcommittee on Speech Privacy in Hospitals, a cooperative arrangement between TCAA, the Technical Committee on Noise (TCN), and the Technical Committee on Speech Communication (TCSC). The Institute for Noise Control Engineering (INCE) and the National Council of Acoustical Consultants (NCAC) have provided liai- son with the subcommittee, as well.
Members of the subcommittee
approached the American Institute of
Architects (AIA) inquiring into how the
subcommittee could serve AIA by pro-
viding general guidelines and criteria
for speech privacy to be included in the
AIA Guidelines for Design and
Construction of Health Care Facilities.
Their response was that they needed
assistance with all aspects of sound and
vibration in the design of all types of healthcare settings. In response, the subcommittee assembled a team of writers that prepared what is known as the Interim Sound and Vibration Design Guidelines for Hospital and Healthcare Facilities. As would be expected, part of this document addressed speech privacy in healthcare facilities by providing speech privacy design goals and discussing methods for evaluating speech privacy. However, the Interim Guidelines in themselves are not intended to be a standard per se, but rather a tool for architects to use in identifying what and how acoustical design issues including speech privacy are to be addressed.
Speech privacy standards work and applicable regulations
In view of this need for compliance criteria, a new Standards Working Group S12/WG44, Speech Privacy, was
Privacy laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Gramm Leach Bliley Act, Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, and other state, provincial and local laws have created a need for standards and guidelines to enable enforcement of the consumer’s right to privacy.
founded in 2005 whose mission was to focus on the need for comprehensive stan- dards and guidelines in healthcare acoustics and speech privacy. The need can be no bet- ter highlighted than by recognizing that hos- pitals have been cited by the Joint Commission (on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations) for having insuf- ficient speech privacy. Yet there are no stan- dards or widely used guidelines for what constitutes acceptable speech privacy in healthcare settings, how it is evaluated, or how it can be achieved in healthcare facil- ity design.
The Working Group (WG) operates within a dynamic environment of rapid- ly changing public policies that pro- duces a burgeoning need for guidelines and standards. S12/WG44 has prepared an initial draft of a speech privacy stan- dard for Working Group discussion titled S12.70 Speech Privacy in Healthcare Facilities. It is being prepared in concert with other standards devel- opment activities related to speech pri- vacy, most notably work taking place in the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) International. This work relies heavily on research under-
taken by the National Research Council of Canada.
The Working Group’s activity in drafting a speech priva- cy standard responds to the needs of the public, the needs of those designing healthcare facilities, and is, in part, in response to Federal and state legislative efforts. Six different areas of federal legislation set the pace and focus of the stan-
dards-development activity of S12/WG44. These are:
(a) Privacy laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Gramm Leach Bliley Act (GLBA), Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), and other state, provincial and local laws have created a need for standards and guidelines to enable enforcement of the consumer’s right to privacy.
30 Acoustics Today, October 2008