What if the people your buildings are built for helped you design them?
We work alongside architects, design teams, and healthcare organizations to bring structured lived experience into the design process — before construction starts, before costs compound, and before the people inside the building pay the price of decisions made without them.
A system that doesn't focus on one voice, but has voices behind the one to support the decision.
The design process has always been missing a voice. We built a system to bring it in.
The design process has always been missing a voice. We built a system to bring it in.
Every psychiatric and behavioral health facility is designed using clinical guidelines, building codes, and safety standards. What's almost never included — systematically, safely, and in a form design teams can actually use — is the perspective of the people who've lived inside these buildings.
That omission has a price tag. Facilities designed without lived experience produce longer lengths of stay, more behavioral incidents, higher per-admission costs, and higher rates of recidivism after discharge. The research is unambiguous.
LEES changes that.
Think of it as a Pre-Occupancy Evaluation — the insights that usually surface after a building opens, surfaced before a wall goes up, when changes cost nothing.
What you receive:
Evidence Briefs — structured, design-ready findings your team can act on. Not raw quotes. Not a summary. Decision-grade evidence that sits alongside your clinical guidelines and informs decisions at the unit layout, material selection, staff station, and circulation levels.
Equitable Futures Simulator — compare design options across four equity dimensions: Safety, Dignity, Recovery Support, and Cultural Responsiveness. Built from real lived experience, not assumptions.
Implementation Tracking — every evidence item logged with its status and the rationale behind each design decision. A documented accountability record from first stakeholder conversation through construction.
We handle everything. Recruitment. Trauma-informed facilitation. AI-assisted pattern recognition. Peer reviewer validation by people with their own lived experience.
A LEES engagement costs less than 0.13% of a typical project budget. A single avoided renovation — one seclusion area redesign, one unit layout fix — saves 10x that investment.
You get the output — we carry the process.
Are you ready?
Beginning in 2026, psychiatric hospitals and inpatient psychiatry units will be required to collect and report the new Psychiatric Inpatient Experience Survey (PIX). Most organizations are still figuring out what PIX means for staffing, workflows, governance, and culture.
The MCC PIX Infrastructure Suite™ supports hospitals in building the structures needed to implement PIX effectively, ethically, and sustainably. Our approach blends psychiatric inpatient expertise, lived experience leadership, and practical implementation support tailored to the realities of behavioral health environments.
Our Suite Includes:
- Compliance & Implementation Consulting
PIX readiness assessments, governance and workflow design, staffing models, and advisory support. - Training & Workforce Development
Training for PIX data collectors, supervisors, leaders, and frontline staff using trauma-informed and recovery-oriented approaches. - Digital Tools & Reporting Frameworks
Non-downloadable planning tools, reporting templates, dashboards, and quality-improvement frameworks that help translate PIX results into meaningful operational improvements.
Want support preparing for PIX?
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Co-Design & MCC's Lived Experience Advisory Network
At MindCareConnect, we believe the people most impacted by mental health systems are the most qualified to help redesign them.
Our Lived Experience Advisory Network (LEAN) is a curated global community of individuals who bring firsthand expertise across mental health, substance use, crisis services, youth systems, institutional care, family caregiving, reentry, and more. Spanning the United States, Australia, and beyond, our network reflects the reality that the need for systems change is not limited by geography — and neither is the wisdom to drive it.
These are not token voices , they are informed, skilled, and purposeful collaborators who work alongside our team to shape programs, policies, built environments, and systems from the inside out.
Co-design is at the heart of how we work.
MindCareConnect doesn't consult on behalf of lived experience — we build alongside it. Our LEAN contributors are embedded directly into the co-design process, from early discovery and ideation through feedback, iteration, and final recommendations. When organizations partner with MindCareConnect, lived expertise isn't a footnote. It's a foundation.
What makes our network different
Our contributors are vetted, supported, and compensated. They are matched to projects based on lived expertise, working style, and meaningful fit — not availability or optics. We maintain clear ethical standards around consent, boundaries, and role integrity so that lived experience is elevated, never extracted.
Ready to transform systems?
Let’s design what’s next—together.
We help organizations co-create systems, services, and spaces where lived experience leads. If you’re ready to collaborate with empathy and purpose, we’re ready to build alongside you.