Facilities, Utilities, and Equipment: Key Hospital Regulations

Failure is not an option when you’re striving to provide a safe, healthy environment for essential hospital staff and patients. Satisfying key hospital regulations requires appropriate planning, continuous monitoring, and thorough analysis of core building management systems (BMS) data to ensure key performance indicators are met. Advanced building analytics and data-driven automation can help you more reliably adhere to regulations and proactively keep buildings up to code.

Facilities, Utilities, and Equipment: Key Hospital Regulations

The healthcare industry is continually changing in response to growing knowledge and changing concerns. Many of these changes are reflected within the regulation of hospital facilities, utilities, and equipment, which seek to ensure the safety of patients, staff, and the larger community.

Hospital & Clinic Regulations

In California, the Office of Statewide Health and Planning Department (OSHPD) has established standards that require healthcare buildings to adhere to strict requirements for electronic systems, plumbing and mechanical codes, fire protection, and California Green Buildings codes. Hospitals must also adhere to strict seismic regulations to ensure efficiency, safety, and uptime.

For OSHPD, the idea is that by adhering to these standards, owners and operators of hospital and ancillary buildings will reduce the risks inherent to operating these types of buildings. These risks include:

• The risk of airborne infectious diseases and viruses.
• Humidity and sterilization concerns, particularly those related to operating theaters and outpatient treatment clinics.
• Environmental or operational breaches that compromise safety.
• Plumbing problems that result in water contamination.

Gas and vacuum systems, as well as hospital electrical power systems, are also covered to reduce the possibility of outages. Hospitals and clinics that produce and house pharmaceuticals must adhere to additional standards, such as the Current Good Manufacturing Practice (CGMP) regulations. In all cases, proactively ensuring compliance falls upon the building owner or manager.

Energy Efficiency Standards

In addition to state-specific building codes and requirements for hospitals, a growing number of states have significant regulations related to energy efficiency in medical settings. For example, New York City’s building energy efficiency rules and regulations for hospital facilities require that when a building is sold and occupied by too many people, there are strict audits, fines, and consequences related to noncompliance. And New York isn’t the only state targeting energy-efficiency goals. In fact, states like Texas that have been hit by major, unexpected power outages due to storms, are increasingly appreciating the need for secured, safe, and effective facilities, utilities, and equipment.

Proactively Adhering to Key Hospital Regulations

Facilities, utilities, and equipment largely rely on automation to keep hospitals and medical clinics operating within industry standards—which includes 24/7 uptime. However, automation alone is not enough to ensure optimal performance or regulatory compliance. Today, the core infrastructure that ensures patients and essential workers are safe, healthy, and comfortable requires that systems like HVAC, electrical, plumbing are interconnected and communicating effectively. 

Adding an analytics layer to your BMS allows you to take advantage of these connections to improve operations and adhere to diverse standards. By working with a controls industry expert to integrate advanced analytics and relevant IoT devices with your BMS, operations can be optimized and you can effectively address standards-related issues before failures occur. Some of the most significant benefits of this include:

• Proactive maintenance. With advanced fault detection and diagnostics, prioritized alarms, and machine learning capabilities, an advanced analytics platform can detect issues as soon as possible—sometimes even before they happen. As such you can move from a reactive maintenance approach to a targeted, proactive approach, minimizing the risk of major equipment failure and downtime.
• Automated Corrections. An analytics platform can trigger automated adjustments,  keeping malfunctions from impacting patients and staff.
• Efficiency Recommendations. By mining historical data, an intelligent analytics platform can proactively identify inefficiencies and recommend pragmatic solutions.

With the right platform, you become better equipped to meet guidelines and efficiency goals.

Best-in-Class Analytics 

From operating rooms and ICU areas to labs and clinics, failure is not an option. And every part of your operation should be designed and constructed according to regulation. Today, that increasingly means adding smart analytics to your tech stack. 

onPoint Analytics is a best-in-class platform built by industry experts to give you extraordinary insight and control over your facility. By continuously monitoring data from all connected equipment, devices, and systems, onPoint is a powerful technology that helps you meet your regulatory burdens while delivering optimal environments to your buildings’ diverse users. 

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