Hospitals can be uncomfortable places for patients, and major efforts are underway to try to put patients more at ease.

Today, hospitals are relying on the power of skylights to relax patients before a procedure or an imaging exam. The skylights are backlight images installed on ceilings, made to give off the illusion of a real sky.

And in this new era of health care reform where patient satisfaction is front and center, products like these are becoming more popular than ever.
"The patient's satisfaction has become more important than ever," Ernesto Machado, founder and managing director at TESS, told DOTmed News.

Two major players in the market today are Therapeutic Environmental Solutions (TESS) and the Sky Factory.

Machado added that these backlit images are the "most cost efficient programs that you can use to show the patient that you're doing something on their behalf." Since it shows them that you're considerate of their emotional comfort, it makes it a "hot item" in today's market.

It all started about 30 years ago when a Harvard biologist named Edward O. Wilson published a study called "Biophilia." He explored a phenomenon called biophilic engagement, which is the notion that people seek out positive experiences in nature, and as a result, become more relaxed.

When Sky Factory opened its doors 12 years ago, they kept this idea at the forefront. "Due to our inherent need to affiliate with nature we can trigger the biophilic 'relaxation response' even in an artificial environment," David A. Navarrete Maciel, business development and public relations for Sky Factory, told DOTmed News.

The company has four different products — Luminous SkyCeilings (backlit skylight images), SkyV, (virtual skylights), Luminous Virtual Windows, (illuminated window images) and eScape, (virtual window scenes). However, the Luminous SkyCeilings are the most popular.

Sky Factory has 50 partners and has installed over 7,000 virtual skylights and windows around the world, including Japan, Australia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. They believe they are the leaders in the field because they are the only virtual skylight and window company that has published research in peer-reviewed journals on their products.

Two years ago, the company partnered with Texas Tech University's Neuroimaging Institute to research the neural effects of their photographic sky compositions, which are used in the Luminous SkyCeiling. The researchers used functional MRI to create brain maps of the subjects' neural activation when they looked at the photographic sky compositions and compared it with the subjects that looked at other positive, negative or neutral images.

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