Can Color Impact Healthcare Culture?

Hospitals are a fascinating space to study color. Inside the walls of emergency departments and patient wards are choices influenced by hundreds of years of medical culture. The vector of color often feels unconsciously selected in the evolution of these hospital settings — filled with medical devices, flooring, and furniture designed primarily for durability, risk-reduction, and stain prevention. Even so, it is true that someone chose that particular beige for the fire-rated curtain or that exact blue pattern (that to me looks suspiciously similar to the design of a checkbook) for the hospital gown.  

What are hospitals trying to say with color today? Is it working? Maybe it’s not actually what patients want. And with that in mind, how might we build a more colorful future that changes this dynamic?

To start, let’s review a quick chronology of the color influences in the modern hospital spaces through three periods of rapid change:

Germ theory emerged at the end of the 19th century and revolutionized medicine over the course of only a few decades. With the new knowledge of bacteria, disease, and biology, western medicine rapidly turned from colors tied to religion (black, stained-glass jewel tones) to sterile white in order to demonstrate cleanliness. Around the same time, both Johnson & Johnson and the Red Cross began using the inverted Swiss flag as their symbols, bringing red into the picture, and a surgeon in San Francisco chose spinach green for medical paints and textiles in order to ease his eyesight during procedures. By the 1920s, this trifecta of white, red, and green was established to convey modern medical authority. 

Just a few decades later, the war effort helped to make America an industrial design powerhouse, and a 1940s color theorist in Chicago named Faber Birren developed influential guides to color for implementation in factories, the military, and healthcare settings. His selection of “functional colors” for hospitals included softer variations of the earlier reds and greens with an emphasis on peach, yellow, and, especially, “misty green,” which he called “fresh in appearance and slightly passive in quality.”

Jump ahead to the late 1990s, and we see purple and blue expand in the healthcare setting through a couple of key milestones. Nitrile gloves were produced in purple in 1997 to distinguish them from the regular latex variety. Viagra enters the scene as the famous “little blue pill,” and electronic health record technology introduces the pervasive mid-tone blue of early software. Through the late 2010s, blue became a popular “safe” color for banks, startups, and healthcare organizations.   

These color epochs from the past 150 years still dominate healthcare. Inside your local hospital today, you’ll see doctors in white coats in rooms with paint, flooring, and textiles in an early mid-century pastel color palette straight from Birren, with a logo and patient check-in screen in that millennium blue. These colors are designed to tell patients: “feel safe!” “feel relaxed!” “feel modern!” Unfortunately, it turns out that this is not what patients actually want. 

In reality, patients today often feel unsafe, helpless, like an outsider and that they can’t trust healthcare. We have entered a systemic crisis of trust period in healthcare, where it is frequently not the lack of treatment options, but earned distrust that holds back our healthcare progress. 

Where do we go from here? It is perhaps time for the next epoch in the long history of color in medicine: the patient-led color palette. It has never been easier and more affordable to test what would happen if we give patients power over the colors in their healthcare experience.

Color spectrum LED lights can be connected to patient experience apps in hospital rooms and exam rooms. Barcodes and RFID badges already used for patient care could carry packets of information about color preference, changing the environment around a patient as they navigate through a hospital stay. Patients could choose their own colors in real time, with “tell me about the color you’ve chosen” as a potentially much more dynamic opening query for clinicians than “how are you feeling today?” All this with color as a vector comes with remarkably few patient safety, cost, and HIPAA privacy concerns. 

When a patient selects their own color, they are living with more agency in the hospital; they are communicating their feelings and needs to clinicians. And if stitched together in live color projections with the colors from other patients, these colors could start to tell a very different story of real life inside the hospital. 

A more vivid landscape of patient-selected colors may show that patients don’t feel safe, relaxed, or modern but that they do feel seen.

Image credit: Engstrom, A. (2022)

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