Annual check-up: Time for healthcare to examine its assets
5 trends leading to a shift in asset and energy management for 2023
The healthcare industry is facing a conundrum: boost the quality of experience for workers and patients, modernize facilities and tackle the challenges of hiring across functions — while finding ways to pay for it all.
COVID-19 rapidly redirected budgets from overdue facility updates to focus on airflow, HVAC and space management. Now, leaders must rebalance the funds needed for short- and long-term improvements as they also promote positive healthcare patient and worker experiences.
But funding is sparse, and healthcare isn’t immune to higher costs. And with higher priorities related to staffing challenges, patient safety and minimal visibility into the needs of facilities managers, it can be confusing for health systems leaders to know where to best allocate maintenance and operations (M&O) spending. On one side, repairing or replacing equipment and materials is necessary to satisfy health and safety requirements. On the other, aging facilities and plants also call for structural improvements, energy efficiency upgrades, and staff to maintain operations and upkeep.
Healthcare, by nature, provides time-critical, clean and safe services to the community, services that are highly dependent on optimally performing facilities. Asset managers need help to ensure buildings, plants and systems maintain functionality.
Managing energy or an asset over its lifecycle is the key to providing the environment required by workers and patients — so long as the money can be found to support operations. To gain alignment, everyone from the person signing off on the budget to the M&O professionals that keep facilities running needs a common language complete with tools that can leverage data and deliver actionable insights so funding can be distributed to the most impactful projects.
Amidst staffing challenges, aging infrastructure expenses and new compliance regulations ignited by COVID-19, organizations have no option but to spend wisely. In this guide, we’ll explore how to bridge the disconnect between administrative and operations leaders to tackle five of the most pressing healthcare-specific market trends affecting hospitals and health systems, including:
1. Health and safety of workers and patients
2. Supply chain-driven cost increases
3. Growing complexity of assets
4. Rising energy costs
5. Sustainability
Download your free copy to how your organization stacks up amongst the trends.
