scope:

This standard provides a relationship between speech privacy descriptors and speech privacy expectations for various enclosed and open-plan healthcare spaces. Descriptors used to characterize speech privacy expectation are the articulation index (AI)¹ and the privacy index (PI).

This standard also provides design criteria for achieving acceptable speech privacy in healthcare facilities including treatment rooms, clinicians' offices, pharmacies, reception/waiting areas, etc.

This standard provides covered entities, architectural design teams, acoustical consultants, and regulators guidelines and objective criteria for designing healthcare facilities that provide sufficient speech privacy to protect personal health information (PHI) as required by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

The standard also provides general guidance on the relationship between expectations of speech privacy and objective descriptors used to evaluate speech privacy.

The annexes also provide guidance on how speech privacy can be obtained in different types of architectural spaces and circumstances, and how to objectively evaluate speech privacy to verify conformance with these criteria.

¹ The current version of ANSI/ASA S3.5-1997 (R2012) Methods for Calculation of the Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) replaces articulation index (AI). SII includes the same signal-to-noise consideration forming the basis of AI, but adds other effects that sometimes degrade speech intelligibility such as hearing threshold and masking effects, and adds methods for evaluating SII at the inner ear for telephony applications.