8 Tips for Improving Facilities Management for a Hospital

We are painfully aware: hospitals are over-extended. With many moving parts, facilities management for a hospital is an essential role in ensuring maximum system-wide uptime. Now more than ever, building managers are looking to technology to support facilities managers deliver consistent, reliable, comfortable and safe spaces on a day-to-day, usually 24-hour basis. With these tips, you can create a blueprint for improving the way your hospital is managed and transform the way facilities managers work.

Questions to Address Up Front

Before you take steps to improve facilities management for a hospital, it’s essential to assess the pain points in your operation. Some questions to ask include:

• Do you have a way to view critical details about your facilities, such as equipment status, remotely?
• Is your facility designed for optimal efficiency?
• Is your maintenance strategy reactive or proactive?
• Are you relying on staff for tasks that could be automated?
• Should you integrate multiple facilities to streamline maintenance? 
• Are you running a cost-efficient operation? If not, what are your key concerns?
• Are you concerned about occupancy levels, thermal comfort, or indoor air quality?

An experienced building integration and analytics expert can help you ask the right questions and find the answers by identifying facility problems, operational inefficiencies, and occupant concerns.

8 Tips for Improving Facilities Management for a Hospital

Each facility within a hospital system or healthcare provider organization has different priorities, goals, and areas of vulnerability. But these 8 tips can be a starting point to improving facilities management in most hospitals, clinics, and medical office buildings:

1. Integrate Analytics for 24x7 Monitoring. An advanced analytics platform will continuously monitor all parts of your system and provide real-time insights via a mobile-accessible dashboard. That means your facilities team can spend more time troubleshooting critical alarms and less time chasing down every setpoint change across their campuses. 
2. Design or Redesign Facilities for Peak Efficiency  Hospitals consume a lot of power. By using intelligent analytics, you can track how, when, and why energy is being used, and uncover pragmatic ways of improving efficiency, whether during construction or retrofitting.
3. Deploy Advanced Fault Detection and Diagnostics. An analytics platform with advanced fault detection and diagnostics can rapidly identify the root cause of malfunctions and simplify the troubleshooting process, even within complex building systems. With a clear understanding of anomalies, facilities managers can allocate resources more efficiently, ultimately minimizing reliance on manual intervention and speeding up the time to resolution.
4. Automate Intelligently. New technologies are introducing better and more sophisticated options for automation. Smart analytics can allow you to find new opportunities for automation and refine existing automation, reducing the need for human intervention and the risk of human error. When automation is driven by machine learning-capable analytics, automated actions can also become more precise and more useful over time, and maintenance staff is free to focus on more important tasks.
5. Connect Facilities. When a facilities team is responsible for more than one building, a connected system design and advanced building analytics deployed across your portfolio can provide greater visibility into disparate systems and reduce work replication.
6. Improve Cost Efficiency. An advanced analytics platform can help you identify and prioritize cost-saving opportunities, extend the life of equipment, and reduce utility bills.
7. Address Occupancy Levels, Air Quality, and Thermal Comfort. Occupancy, temperature, and indoor air quality (IAQ) sensors help you understand these parameters within your building and take data-guided steps to improve safety and comfort. For example, in a building system with IoT devices, a smart analytics platform can allow you to write rules that trigger increased ventilation if occupancy rises above a certain level detected or that preheat or pre-cool common areas in anticipation of seasonal changes.
8. Custom Reporting. Hospitals must adhere to stringent reporting requirements for a variety of stakeholders. Choosing a platform with customizable reporting options can ensure documentation is easily accessible. For facilities managers, these reports can be particularly critical to refining management strategies, tracking KPIs, and validating fixes.

In a hospital, these steps can have a big impact on how buildings function, how occupants experience your facilities, and how day-to-day operations unfold. 

The Right Facilities Management Platform

A forward-thinking approach to facilities management for a hospital is one that takes into account the needs of all stakeholders—patients, health care workers, regulatory bodies, and building staff. A cutting-edge analytics platform like onPoint integrated by a master systems integrator (MSI) with who understands health care environments can give you the insight you need to make improvements that address the concerns of these diverse groups. With Buildings IOT as your partner, you will be a step ahead.

Buildings IOT offers the services and technologies you need for facilities, utilities, and equipment for efficient hospital regulations. Contact our team of experts today.