ARxMD® is the Architectural Medicine Software Solution, which is an important part of Architectural Medicine®, the Architectural Doctor®, and the Architectural Medicine System (AMS). Pronounced "arcs med," ARxMD is utilized to define the integrations between the architecture and medical fields to provide cohesive solutions focused on health and wellness in the built environment.

Architectural Medicine LLC is focused on the topics of health and wellness in the built environment. The intent of Architectural Medicine is to help integrate these fields of Architecture and Medicine for the General Public, as well as for the beneficial integrations between Architecture and Medicine. The main goal is to help define these various fields and to participate in creating bridges between these professions in how they might all fit together.

In this way, the average person as the General Public can feel empowered to make the best decisions for themselves, their families, and the future. Yet it’s also important to recognize that the professionals in these fields also deserve to have an integrated approach so they can address client and patient issues, while utilizing best practices for health, healing, and wellness.

The built environment has become much more complex over the past several decades with larger numbers of the population spending more time indoors than ever before. The amount of time spent indoors, on average, has risen to 60 to 90 percent, and with the advent of the novel coronavirus pandemic, those percentages have increased to 100 percent for many.

The fields of Architecture and Medicine have changed quite a bit in the past fifty years, and while there have been many beneficial developments in each of these very large fields, there are still gaps relative to health in the built environment.

There are currently very few overlaps between the fields of architecture and medicine to ensure healthy built environments, including the fact that very few doctors include their patient's buildings in their health evaluations. As well, the average architect is often not trained in human health, and therefore may not be aware of the issues that certain buildings can create.

This includes the increasingly popular developments in the topics of Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) providing the potential for overlap between these fields of architecture and medicine.

One of the key facets of the modern day world is the development of technology in these professional fields. Both architecture and medicine have developed in this realm with tremendous advancements in the electronic and digital worlds, from CAD and BIM in architecture to the digital processes of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) in medical processes.

Both Architectural Medicine and the Architectural Doctor are focused on utilizing these new processes to benefit the two fields to provide better health and wellness in the built environment.

With all of this information on what is not being done, what can be done?

The HL7 Organization provides standards to provide more advanced processes to integrate data using more standardized data interconnectivity. These integrations include SNOMED, ICD, and LOINC as integral parts of these medical codification processes.

This includes the latest HL7 development called FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), which utilizes the more common REST API standards used in software development to allow different medical software applications to talk to one another and exchange data.

ARxMD strives to provide this interoperability between both the architecture and the medical fields using these digital integrations using HL7 FHIR and the many possibilities that these APIs can provide.

As awareness of the built environment on health becomes more widely recognized, the gaps that exist in current modern medical practices excluding the built environment from patient evaluations becomes more pronounced. The world of buildings, in which, on average, an individual can spend up to 90 percent of their time, can be recognized as a plethora of data related to your health. However, in the current day healthcare practices, very little of this potential data is included in patient evaluations.

As more and more data is provided from the Internet of Things (IOT) and the Internet of Medical Things (IOMT), more opportunities become present to not only collect this into data lakes, yet to provision this data through data science into a form of translational informatics, which we call Building Informatics.

The potential to provide insights into the ways in which our buildings impact health and wellness is growing, yet there are few conduits that both collect and evaluate these data streams. Architectural Medicine is working to bridge these gaps, in both the methods of the Healthy Building Inspector and the Building Informaticist, as well as the Architectural Medicine System with ARxMD to utilize methods to collect, evaluate, and utilize this data for doctors and healthcare professionals to support patient and public health.

There is much that can be achieved utilizing these multi-displinary processes to connect many different professions for cohesive solutions for patient and public health, and as Architectural Medicine continues on this path we will provide updates here on software and systems solutions.

Stay tuned for more information on this page, as well as the Architectural Medicine website.